


In a Dark Time, the Eye Begins to See

by atamascolily



Series: Inheritance Side Stories [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Legends - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Bespin, Female Friendship, Fix-It, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Jedi Knights, Mulako Primordial Water Corporation, Nam Chorios, Reunions, Self-Discovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-07
Updated: 2019-02-09
Packaged: 2019-09-13 06:08:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 32,094
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16887072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/atamascolily/pseuds/atamascolily
Summary: On her journey to find herself after leaving Luke, Callista begins to make her peace with the past--with the help of both new and old friends.(A fix-it fic forDarksaberby Kevin J. Anderson, and parts ofPlanet of Twilight, by Barbara Hambly.)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic takes place in [ the Inheritance 'verse](https://archiveofourown.org/series/971142), which diverges from Legends canon at the end of the Thrawn trilogy. Not all of the fics prior to this point have been posted on A03, but the most relevant one is [currently serialized on tumblr](https://atamascolily.tumblr.com/tagged/a-natural-history-of-tatooine), and explains how [Ghent and Callista became friends](https://atamascolily.tumblr.com/post/175577228996/a-natural-history-of-tatooine-part-9). 
> 
> That said, any differences are either irrelevant to this fic or are fully explained in the story, so folks familiar with Legends canon shouldn't find anything too disorienting here. 
> 
> The title is from a poem of the same name by Theodore Roethke.

The _Saints Ascending_ was an antique leisure yacht, a mothballed 121-B from Kuat Drive Yards and barely spaceworthy, but a woman traveling incognito couldn't be choosy. Even as the holo-call from Coruscant came through, the display fritzed and sputtered for several seconds--long enough for Callista to wonder if she should switch to voice-only transmission--only to stabilize the moment she reached for the dial. 

A quarter-sized image of a pale young man lounging in casual sweats appeared on the console. His forehead was speckled with blue half-moon tattoos the same shade as his waist-length hair, which he had a made a hasty but futile effort to comb and restrain in a queue down his back. 

"Hi, Ghent," Callista said, biting her lip to keep from smiling. The slicer's all-too-obvious crush on her was adorable, and she didn't want him to think she was poking fun at him. Ghent was a good friend, and she wanted to keep it that way; she didn't have many of those anymore. "How life as the official New Republic Crypt Chief treating you?" 

Ghent shrugged. "Right now? Boring.The techs are on the routine stuff, and I've been working on side projects just to keep myself entertained." 

"Are they okay with that?" 

"Who? The techs or General bel Iblis?" 

Ghent was not a natural leader--his position as Crypt Chief was due more to his brilliance at slicing than anything approaching social skills--but his unorthodox methods were the dismay of subordinates and superiors alike. Mara Jade and Leia Organa had offered him frequent tips, to no avail--as had General bel Iblis on no less than three memorable occasions. "Either. Both." 

His smile brightened. "No one's gotten mad at me yet. But I've got plenty of time to chat; my code's compiling. What can I help the computer lady with today?" 

That was his nickname for her--one she'd earned for transferring her consciousness into the targeting computers of the dreadnought _Eye of Palpatine_ a decade before he was even born. With the brief exception of Dr. Cray Mingla, Ghent was the only person she'd ever met curious enough about the implications to inquire for more details. 

"I'm looking for someone," Callista said. "Someone who might remember me if she survived Palpatine's purges. She might still be alive on some backwater in the Outer Rim under an assumed name--or she might reduced to space dust, for all I know. I've tried a few HoloNet searches myself, but it's been like trying to pluck one specific mudhen's tailfeather in a tidal marsh during breeding season. I don't even know if it's possible to locate her without the Force." 

"Oh, I'd give myself even odds," Ghent said genially. "I've done this sort of thing for Karrde before from time to time. It's not hard, just tedious. There's a lot of data to process--and sorting out the false positives can be a nightmare--but everything depends on the speed of the motivators involved, not to mention the sieve size and encryption power--" 

"Even if she doesn't want to be found?" 

"Well, that makes it more challenging, but the basic principle is still the same. You just have to narrow it down with a chi-process sort to zero out your sector analysis--" 

And he went off in a ramble of technojargon, intermixed with occasional whistles of Binary with no adequate Basic translation that was more than she could follow. If she understood correctly, his technique involved a complicated analysis quantum patterns and sub-patterns that were only intelligible in large-scale volumes of data. 

Or maybe not. She had been a passable slicer thirty years ago, but technology advanced during her imprisonment. Once again, she was out of her depth in the strange new future that was now her life. Her talent with the Force had bypassed the need for more crude programming manipulations on the _Eye_ , and leaving her struggling now that it was gone--

She closed her eyes, and reach out with her mind to grasp at something that was no longer there, the same reflexive motion she had done every day since awakening in Cray Mingla's body five months earlier. She floated in the abysss, drifted in the empty void of space, screamed into a dead universe that no longer answered her back, that revealed--nothing. 

Blind shadows, where once there had been unending light; cruel silence, where once there had been rich music. The slow, steady hum of life that had been her companion across the tide of years had vanished--along with so many of the abilities she had honed ceaselessly under half a lifetime of Master Djinn Altis's careful training. 

Every day, Callista was grateful for Cray's gift, the ultimate sacrifice given freely as the _Eye of Palpatine_ buckled and trembled underneath them as its guns turned on itself. But the cost was her easy rapport with the Force, and she still mourned her loss. Her new form was a miracle, one that she had never asked for, a second chance of life she'd never even dared to _hope_ for. But it had not been an easy adjustment. 

Luke had once told her the mind made up sensations to fill the voids in its experience, even when there were no longer any nerves left to provide them. His right hand--missing at the wrist in a lightsaber duel with his own father--still ached from time to time.

"Usually at the worst possible moment," he'd said, his lips quirked in that self-effacing half-smile she'd loved, as he shoved a strip of floppy blond hair out of his eyes. 

_Luke--_

She shook her head, as the motion could keep the memory at bay. Ghent, engrossed in his explanation of higher mathematics, was oblivious to her distraction. 

"That's fine, Ghent," she interrupted. Left to his own devices, the slicer would talk her ear off unless she re-directed him. "Let me tell you about the woman I'm looking for." 

She tapped the console beside her. With a muffled squeak, a second image appeared behind Ghent's holo, one they could both see: a young human woman, in the coarse brown robes and distinctive braids of an orthodox Jedi Padawan, grinning broadly as she thurst her blazing blue lightsaber at the camera. She was fourteen, but her eyes belied her youth, with a fierce drive that had gotten her through every obstacle life had thrown at her--and hopefully had kept her alive during the dark years under Palpatine's rule. 

"This is Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy--'Scout' to her friends. She was a student at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant before the Republic fell, one of the few who survived the initial purge there. In the chaos that followed, she ended up on Mandalore, where she was eventually traded--don't ask, it's complicated--to my master, Djinn Altis, as part of a deal to keep her out of the Empire's grasp. We spent about nine months together on his ship, the _Chu'unthor II_ , before Geith and I went to stop the _Eye of Palpatine_." 

"And you think she's still out there somewhere." His eyes lit up like a bonfire at a Bonon harvest festival. " _Cool_. Count me in." 

The holo wheezed, and for a moment, she thought she'd lost him, but the connection held and re-stablized after a moment. 

"She's--not going to be young like you, right?" Ghent added as an afterthought. 

Callista laughed. She couldn't help herself; it was all too absurd. With any luck, Ghent would understand she wasn't really laughing at him. It was either that or cry, and that would only confuse him further. 

"No," she gasped, when she had finally managed to get her breath back. "No, there's no Jedi trick for eternal youth, or at least none that Master Altis ever taught me. I got mine--or at least what passed for eternal youth at the time--through some very unlikely loopholes." 

"Gotcha." With the matter now resolved to his satisfaction, Ghent was already zipping ahead to the next thought. "So we're looking for someone in their mid-forties or thereabouts.--plus or minus a few years if she lied about her age in the official records to dodge the Empire. Full human, right?" 

"Native of Vorzyd V, surrendered to the Jedi Order at the age of three. Beyond that, I don't know. You'd have to dig up old genetics data to find out more." 

A dismissive wave from Ghent, typing furiously into his console. "Boring. I cracked that database ages ago. What's so special about her?"

She set her mouth. "Luke thinks that Master Altis and everyone I knew on the _Chu'unthor II_ is dead," she said at last. "He thinks they would have emerged from hiding if they'd survived; they would have seen the news of a Jedi on the HoloNet and come forward now that the Republic has been restored. 

"He says he would have sensed them by now, and maybe that's so, but he wasn't looking for them specifically; he didn't know them the way I did. I heard so many voices fall silent in those first dreadful years after I--transferred--and I know in my heart Master Altis passed on, but I never heard Scout's voice among them. She wasn't very strong in the Force, and I didn't know her for very long, but--Ghent, you have to understand, she was a _fighter_. She never gave up. And she was so _young_ \--" 

Damn it, she was tearing up, she was crying now, and poor confused Ghent was going to think it was all his fault, and it wasn't. "If anyone I knew survived, it would be her. We just have to _find_ her--" 

Her voice cracked on the last phrase, but it didn't matter. She had exhausted her words and there was nothing more to say. She buried her face in her hands, unable to stop the sobs the wracked her chest as she struggled under the weight of her emotions. 

"Well, it's a start," Ghent said at last, after an awkward few moments of silence. He chewed at his lower lip, clearly uncomfortable, but doing his best to tiptoe around it. Bless him. "No promises, but I'll see what I can do. At the very least, it'll give me a chance to reconfigure the algorithms for that sector-sort analysis I drew up a few years ago for Karrde. I _think_ that'll work for this job--" 

His easy confidence buoyed her up, a rising tide lifting her out of her grief. "That's all I ask," she said, wiping her eyes with her arm. 

"Might take a while, though," he said, staring thoughtfully into the distance. "It's a big galaxy, after all--" 

"I've got nothing but. And you know how to reach me if anything comes up." 

Of course he did. He'd set up the encrypt codes himself. "No problem-o, computer lady. May the Force be with you--" 

With another sputtering hiss, his image flickered out, leaving her alone in the cabin with her thoughts. 

How many times in the course of her life had she said those six simple words? How many partings had ended with that phrase, with neither party knowing what plans fate had in store for them? How many times had she taken the Force for granted, not even dreaming it was possible to lose--?

_The universe has a sense of humor,_ she'd teased Luke once, back when she was still a disembodied ghost in the computer core of the _Eye_ \--five months ago, and an entirely different life from the one she led now. 

He'd only shuddered. "I'll have to be a higher-level Jedi than I am now before I even want to think about _that_." 

_May the Force be with you._ She hadn't said those words to Luke as she walked away from him that final time--nor he to her. The irony was bitter, and dug the knife even further into her heart. It was the prayer she pleaded every day, the one thing she wanted more than anything else in the world, the one thing that would restore her to what she had been, instead of this broken, crippled shell that was her home for the rest of her life. 

She exaggerated. She knew that. She loved being alive again, strange and painful as this new body was after all those lonely years in the computer. Even if she had known what was to come, she still would have taken one last, desperate chance at life when it was offered to her without the slightest hesitation. 

Perhaps it was crueler _because_ she hadn't known. That she had had the opportunity to hope. If she had _known_ what the cost would be from the outset, things might have been different. 

Choosing to live--that was easy. Choosing _how_ to live--was so much harder. 

"May the Force be with me," she whispered into the silence, to the living connection between all things that she had known all her life until now, the power to which she was blind, deaf, and numb.

There was no answer.


	2. Chapter 2

From orbit, Chad was a shining teardrop of deep blue broken only by whirling bands of stormclouds. A few disjointed landmasses dominated by mountains hugged the equator, tapering to vast tidal marshes along the edges before surrendering the sea. Nine moons whirled in and out of view in a complicated dance, tugging and pulling at the oceans like children squabbling over a prize. 

She'd seen countless systems over the years, had stared through the _Eye_ 's computer at the bright wheel of the Moonflower Nebula, and yet space had never lost its wonder for her. She had not returned to this system since she'd departed with Master Altis in the _Chu'unthor II_ fifty years ago, and it was as if she saw the world of her birth for the very first time. 

With a shake of her head, Callista dragged her gaze away from the viewport to focus on steering the crude but functional shuttle down to the planet's surface. Like Master Altis so many years before, she preferred to leave her ship in the relative safety of open space. Chad was not an especially easy place to live at the best of times, prone to sudden quakes and violent tides. 

Unlike other inhabited worlds, even getting to the surface safely was a challenge. Fierce storms could knock an unwary pilot out of the sky, but even more crippling was the planet's lack of amenities on the surface. No centralized air control meant ships could and did pop up at any moment, and finding a safe and stable place to land that wasn't already occupied was an ordeal in and of itself.

Isolated settlements of Chadra-Fan in the uplands might set out a beacon and a landing pad in hopes of luring passing traders; more adventurous visitors crossed their fingers and improvised as best they could. Aside from a small but steady stream of traders and smugglers, and the occasional craft of would-be settlers or slavers, Chad was ignored by the galaxy at large--even the Empire had passed it by--and its accommodations reflected this.

The closest approximation to a conventional spaceport was Billdog Village, a shantytown of wood huts poking out of the mudflats on stilts at the mouth of the Vree River on the equatorial continent. Lactil herders from the mountains mingled in the markets here with foragers from the highland rainforests and deep-sea ranchers come to offload their harvests. It was a bustling place, and a cheerful one, despite the fact that the whole place could be destroyed by a tsunami at any moment.

Thanks to the the sensing technology that human settlers had brought with them, there was generally at least a few minutes' warning before a wave, but that was no guarantee of survival. Just to exist in Billdog Village was to accept the truth of impermanence--that nothing lasted, or _could_ last forever, that life was short and best appreciated fully in the moment. 

The native Chadra-Fan coped with the existential uncertainty by dwelling only at high elevations, outside of the reach of even the most impressive waves. The humans took the opposite route, constructing vast arks and flotillas to ride out the storms and tremors in the deep ocean. Billdog Village was their meeting place, neither fully land nor fully sea, but some nebulous patchwork in between. No one really lived here, but it served far too important a purpose not to be rebuilt anew after each inevitable disaster. 

She brought the shuttle down on an open platform on the inland edge of the Village, and stepped down off the craft to the world she had last seen some fifty years ago. The heavy wet weight of the air--as humid as Yavin, but with the sweet tang of salt and fish in the mix--struck her in the face like a slap, as if all that time away had been a dream and she was now awakening. In that moment, she was ten, not sixty going on twenty-seven; she was young and wild and free and slippery like a tsaelke darting through the waves, and the Force was a bright and shining light within her that had never, ever died--

And then she was back in the present, slack-jawed on the landing platform, breathing heavily. Behind her, oblivious to her distress, the shuttle hissed and rose back to the shelter of the _Saints Ascending_ waiting patiently five thousand kilometers above. 

She shook herself--flexed the hands that were long and narrow instead of callused and broad, shrugged the tangle of hair that was brown at the base and blond at the tips, the transition marking the day Cray had died for everyone to see--as if the motions could exorcise the memories washing over her without warning, like a tsunami over the village. Stowing the slave remote for the shuttle securely in its pouch at her belt next to her lightsaber, she set off towards the hustle and bustle of the market in search of her quarry. 

Deep-sea ranchers were not hard to find. Follow the reek of iodine and sea-cow past the shrine to the Big Green Fish, turn right past the taverns, and there they were, lined up along the docks in front of their ships. It was just past local noon, and the crowds were dying down--the perfect time to strike up a conversation. 

She walked straight up to the first rancher's stall, and made her pitch directly, as was custom: "You lookin' for an extra hand on your next voyage out?" 

He eyed her pale skin and unmuscled arms with skepticism, and shook his head. But he _was_ kind enough to direct her to an older woman two tables down, who had an extra berth on her ark to fill. Gerta Rogath blinked at the request, but said nothing, only hauled out a length of rope and dropped it on the table in front of her in silent challenge. 

Once Callista had proven her chops by tying and untying a series of complicated sailor's knots she had learned at her father's knee, the captain's standoffishness evaporated with dramatic speed. A handshake completed the deal, and she was officially crew, with all the rights and responsibilities her status entailed. 

Later that afternoon, as the sun dropped low in the horizon, transforming the deep blue of the ocean to a mirror of fire, she was up in the rigging with the wind in her hair, hauling line as if she'd never been away. Her ungloved hands were going to burn like _hell_ tomorrow, but it was better to start building the calluses early and Gerta wasn't going to coddle her in the meantime. Cray, for all her other talents, had been practiced with manual labor, and her body reflected it. 

Her mad quest to locate Scout was stalled until Ghent could deliver some leads. In the meantime, there was much to do while she waited, none of which--mercifully--involved the Force. 

*** 

She stayed with the Rogath family's fleet for a whole cycle, long enough to follow the algic current from the equator to the northern pole and back again. Each ark was equipped with a motor for emergencies, but fuel cells were expensive, and used only at greatest need. It was far cheaper and easier--on the budget, if not on the back--to let the wind and water carry ships where they needed to go. So she pinned sails and tied lines, stood her watch at the tiller, scrubbed decks and mended rope, all the day to day tasks of an able-bodied sailor on Chad. 

It was not an easy adjustment. Her mind remembered the work well enough, but her body did not, and it took time for the muscles to adjust, despite her best efforts. She was awkward when she should be confident, clumsy where she should be graceful, and it showed. Every night left her stiff and aching, and every morning was worse. Her hands were on fire for days, raw and bleeding and stinging from the salt spray in the air that coated every exposed surface. 

Gerta raised her eyebrows more than once, but left her newest sailor to her work without comment. The captain's patience was justified--by the end of the second week, Callista was casting nets and steering sea-cows with the rest of the crew, as if she had been doing so all her life. 

It was a hard life, but a pleasurable one, and she gloried in it. She leaped off the planked decks into the shallower seas, kicking through the strokes that every child learned before they could walk. She gloried in the cries of aerinths swirling overhead and tsaelkes dancing on the waves, the pink luminescent glow of tubular eels as the fleet passed over and around their twilight migrations through the temperate zones. She tracked the motions of moon and stars overhead, sang shanties with the crew, and got loud and boisterously drunk one memorable evening on a particularly fine barrel of homemade whiskey (with a hangover to match the next day). 

When the cy'een whistled and breached the surface next to her ark, lancing its long bronzed-black neck to the sky as it came up for air, she trembled, but didn't hesitate. Seconds later, she was in the water, reaching for its scaled back, thrusting herself up onto its muscled shoulders as it nickered and leaped, arcing through the water, carrying her along for the ride, even as its fellows bugled for it to come on, come on, join them, further up--

By the time Callista let go, she was breathless and laughing, exulting in the wild power of the cy'eens, swift and strong and beautiful in every motion. Pushed along by the swift current--had caught up with her, and a few swift kicks brought her within reach of a dangled rope and a helping hand, to haul her back to shelter. Full of effervescent joy that no darkness--or even Gerta's stern admonitions--could taint, she snuck glances in the direction of the herd at intervals, as if to satisfy herself that the excursion had been no dream. 

There were no Jedi here. Nothing here was beyond the capacity of her mind or body. She _fit_ here, as she had not on Yavin, despite her best efforts. There was no need for comparisons, or jealousy--and with it, the whispers of the Dark Side that lurked in the back of her mind. She was Callista, and she was alive, and she had rode a cy'een once more as she had done in her youth long ago. In that shining hour, nothing else mattered. Nothing else was needed. She was complete and whole, at peace with herself and the world. 

It didn't last, of course--nothing ever did. But for a long, long time, it was enough. 

***

She knew better than to venture into troubled waters by inquiring too closely about the Masana clan. She'd left her birth family a long time ago, and made her peace with that decision a long time ago, as had they; nothing more needed to be said. Her mother was long dead, and likely her father was, too, and all her uncles with him. She doubted her step-siblings would be pleased by a visit from a Jedi ghost from the past. She knew how mad her story would sound: of a vast battle station and a lonely vigil, of sacrifice and resurrection beyond the reach of ordinary folk. Some things were better left alone. 

The Jedi had become her family, a vast extended network of kinship based on Force and feelings rather than biology and blood. _That's why I want to find Scout,_ she realized one evening towards the end of a late watch, blinking back tears as she stared up at the star-studded arm of the galaxy sprawled above her. _I don't have any other family left--_

She hadn't known Scout well then. They'd met for the first time in the chaos of the Empire's rise, after the younger woman had fled Coruscant for the relative safety of the _Chu'unthor II_ via a prisoner exchange on Mandalore. Callista's first impression had been a disheveled mass of red hair and an intensity of spirit that belied her small stature. Scout was a fighter, and any limitations to her Force ability were more than compensated by her determination and polished skills. Her motto in training was "to the pain, and beyond" and it showed. She'd once won a Temple fighting tournament by yanking on an opponent's training lightsaber with her bare hands and using it as a lever to get close enough to employ crippling joint locks. 

"She needs our support," Master Altis had said to Callista when Scout first came on board. "She's lost two Masters already, on top of everything else. Don't let her cut herself off from us, too. Keep her awake."

Not knowing how else to engage her, Callista invited Scout to spar with her the next day. She taught Scout a few new tricks with a lightsaber, and learned more than she had ever thought possible about joint locks, though her wrists ached for days afterwards. It was the right decision. Only after a few hours of grueling practice would Scout even begin to open up. Even then, she spoke mostly of trivialities, the minutiae of everyday life, never anything personal. 

The training sessions had continued off and on for several months, right up until rumors began circulating of a vast dreadnaught under construction in the Moonflower Nebula, a weapon to level a rumored Jedi holdout on Belsavis. The news triggered Callista's hasty departure with her partner Geith to investigate, not knowing what awaited them. 

Neither of them would ever return to the _Chu'unthor II_. Geith had abandoned her on the _Eye of Palpatine_ , taking their ship in a desperate--and ultimately futile--quest for help. The _Eye_ 's automated guns had shot him out of the sky before he could jump to lightspeed, and he had died instantly. His death meant Callista had no choice but to destroy the ship on her own-- 

Yes, Scout would likely still remember her, if only in passing. But it didn't matter. Family was family, no matter what. Scout might be the only person in the galaxy who would _understand_ what it was like to be the last one standing--and also what it was like to be an outsider among the Jedi. She wouldn't judge Callista for her sacrifices--or for her losses. 

_Who knows, she might even be glad to see me..._

So much had happened out in the wider galaxy over the last three decades, transforming it into a place Callista no longer recognized. Food, music, clothes, slang, customs--even technology was different. The ravages of two decades of civil war and a new government had brought even more changes with them. 

And yet life on the raft-fleets of Chad was the same as it had been in her childhood. If she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine that she had imagined her life, that she was ten years old again, in the days before Master Altis had come for her. Any second now, Uncle Dro would call for her to stop daydreaming and come help with the wander-kelp harvest--

Almost. 

The seeds of her unhappiness were not something she could easily abandon. She carried them with her, and no matter how hard she ran, they always caught up with her in the end. 

She had tried every way she knew to feel the Force again. Luke Skywalker, the most powerful Jedi of the reborn order, had done what he could to help, as had all of the teachers and students at the fledgling Academy on Yavin IV. She'd combed the archives with Tionne for hours, in a fruitless search for clues, but found nothing of use. She'd meditated for days and come out of it with stiff muscles and a calm mind, but no closer to resolving her dilemma. She'd pushed and struggled, relaxed and let go. It didn't matter. Nothing worked, not even the faintest flicker. 

It was hard, struggling with the basic exercises to no avail while others blasted past her at lightspeed. She had defined herself for so long by her abilities--as a Jedi, a protector, a peacemaker, an initiate of the Force--that the loss had blindsided her. Combined with thirty long, lonely years imprisoned in a battleship's computer bank while her friends and mentors died in droves--and a new body--she wasn't sure who she was anymore. Or if it was even possible for her to find out as long as she stayed on Yavin. 

Luke hadn't liked that idea. 

Luke. 

Seven years after the Empire's fall, the last of the Jedi stumbled across the _Eye of Palpatine_ in deep space and was taken prisoner. His presence on the ship had wakened her spirit from a long, drowsy slumber in the gunnery computer, and she'd reached out to him. One thing lead to another, and they fell in love. 

He'd known her better than anyone ever had, even Geith, and she had known _him_ , the worst and the best of him all wrapped up together. They'd traded dreams back and forth at night while waiting for the end. And then, miracle of miracles, his student Cray had sacrificed herself to keep Callista alive, offered her body to hold Callista's spirit--

\--only to find herself numb, blinded, deaf to the Force--and _alive_. And that had been enough--for a time. 

Luke hadn't wanted Callista to leave. Nor had she wanted to leave Luke. He was beautiful, yes, but it was his innate goodness, his kindness, his determination to do the right thing, bright and shining in every motion, that she loved. So she hesitated, and let him persuade her to stay with tender patience. 

But when it was clear to her that she would have no peace if she stayed, she'd been forced to take matters into her own hands, and walk away. 

It hurt. It still hurt, and it would probably always hurt. Her jaw clenched at the memory of Luke's startled expression when she'd broken the news, his blue eyes wide with shock and dismay. He'd begged her not to go. Offered to come with her. To wait for her as long as it took for her to do what she must, since she was so deadset on going alone. 

She shook her head and refused. Just as she had on the _Eye_ , when he would have spared the ship to save her life--and, in doing so, doom them all. 

She couldn't feel the Force, but she knew in her core that restoring that connection would demand everything she had and more. There was no room for distractions, no room for a relationship; she had to be free to find out who she really was before she could even attempt it. She couldn't afford to have anything holding her back. 

And she didn't know where this journey would take her, or how long, or what her life would look like at the end of it, if indeed she succeeded and her powers were restored. It wasn't fair to Luke to make him wait for her. No matter how much she cherished their relationship, she had to let it go, make it clear to him that it was over. Maybe some other time, some other place, some other way--but not right now. And maybe not ever again. 

It was the right choice. It had to be the right choice. And even if it wasn't--it was done. She could only go forward from here. 

There was nothing else left for her to do. 

She'd hitched a ride from Yavin to the financial hub of Muunilist in the Imperial Remnant. She stayed long enough to contact Ghent and access Cray's bank account--one of the many things she had inherited from Dr. Mingla, along with her body--and use the credits to purchase a ship of her own. The _Saints Ascending_ was a junker now, but it had good bones, as the pilots said, and it was the best she could afford on short notice. 

She'd made Luke promise not to follow her, but she'd done what she could to hide her tracks, taking on an assumed name and false ID for the _Ascending_. She was restless, unsettled, dizzy with the options, and unable to sit still. Only when she was in motion could she relax. The ocean never stopped moving, and neither did the raft-fleets of her homeworld. It was the best place to be while she was waiting for answers. 

As the end of the cycle neared, so did the reckoning--whether she should renew her contract for another round, or depart. She was surprised at how reluctant she was to press on to other systems. Yes, it was wonderful here--but that very comfort, like her relationship with Luke, could be a trap of its own if she wasn't careful. Left to her own devices, she could linger here forever, never following through with her quest. 

She knew herself too well for that to be anything but cowardice. 

Two days' sail northeast of the first continental village, Ghent's news of a possible Scout siting saved her from having to make the decision. _Thank you, I'm on it,_ she messaged back to him across the wide gulf of interstellar space, and let Gerta know she'd be disembarking when the ships anchored in port again and her contract ran out. 

_Good luck,_ he sent back, a message she didn't find until she was already in hyperspace on her way to Wokat Minor, where a woman with uncanny similarity to Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy lived an unassuming life in a minor enclave of an obscure religious order. _Remember what I said about false positives...._


	3. Chapter 3

It _was_ a false positive. So was the next one, and the one after that. She didn't care. It was good to have a goal that didn't involve the Force, even if it was just as impossible to achieve. 

"It's _not_ impossible," Ghent protested when she said as much during yet another holo-call. "It's _quantum_. Totally different. And the protocol's working perfectly. Do you know how many false positives I got the last time I did this? Three hundred and fifty out of billions! Not bad at all!" 

_How can you say it's working if you have so many wrong answers?_ , she wanted to ask, but knew better than to open that particular can of mynocks. The theory itself was sound--the difficulties only emerged in practice. 

"The math is very clear,I just don't have enough data or processors to run all the equations at once, otherwise I could get a clear match on the first try," Ghent continued, oblivious to Callista's train of thought. "And it's complicated because unlike your average resident of the galaxy, she's survived this long by hiding; she's really good at it, and any model that doesn't take that into account is worse than useless. So I have to run extra simulations to make up for it. Even with an initially low probability, you can compensate by substituting--" 

He was talking too fast, the words all jumbled together in strings of jargon, some of which he might have coined on the spot. _Probably afraid I'm going to ask him about drugs again_ , she thought, shaking her head. For all his illicit activities in Talon Karrde's employ, Ghent was surprisingly innocent about the darker aspects of the smuggling life. He hadn't said no when she'd asked, but her inquiries in that direction had scared him badly and she regretted it. Luke hadn't been too happy, either... 

Well, she'd been desperate for _anything_ that might let her touch the Force, no matter how dangerous, and drugs had seemed like a good idea at the time. Once she'd come to her senses, she'd seen her fixation for what it was: a warning sign that life on Yavin wasn't good for her, no matter what Luke claimed. Happy people did not obsess over dangerous, addictive, and highly illegal drugs that might grant them psychic powers. 

As long as she stayed with Luke, she would be tempted. She'd chosen to leave on her own terms rather than risk succumbing to drugs--or worse, the Dark Side. She wasn't sure if those quiet whispers in the back of her mind were the stirrings of the less benevolent aspects of the Force or her own desperation, and hoped she'd never have the opportunity to find out. 

"Let me know when something else comes up, then," Callista sighed at length, when Ghent paused his monologue long enough to breathe. 

He favored her with a wry smile. "And what will you do in the meantime?" 

"Start where I left off," she said, and ended the call. 

***

Dawn over the skies of Bespin was a sight to behold. Shafts of sunlight on the horizon illuminated the swarms of algae and air-plankton drifting in the air, transforming the turbulent clouds into a sea of dusky pink. Borne on the gaseous thermals that eddied up from the gas giant's core, they were food for the winged rawwks and tentacled beldons, which in turn fed the vast predatory velkers that prowled the atmosphere in search of their next meal. Callista watched it all with wonder as the _Saints Ascending_ plunged through a school of air-plankton so thick it was impossible to tell where they ended and the clouds began. 

Master Altis had loved this planet, and it had been the home of the _Chu'unthor II_ for as long as Callista could remember. Though the floating academy roamed where it was needed, the skies of Bespin had always been a refuge where they could meditate undisturbed among the clouds. Most of her training had taken place here, and it had served as a hideout in those dark, awful days after the Republic's fall, when the Jedi were destroyed on sight. 

Her last glimpse of Master Altis had been in the landing bay of the _Chu'unthor II_ as Geith brought their two-seat Y-wing around, its engines groaning in protest at the sudden reversal. Master Altis and Scout looked up at them amidst a tumult of students and droids, their hands raised in farewell. Master Altis was cloaked in that same affectionate serenity he always wore, but Scout was nervous and tense, her shoulders hunched as she watched yet another pair of Jedi depart, perhaps never to return. 

And then Geith had punched the engine, and they were gone. The Y-wing zipped away into the night, rising through the atmosphere to face the stars. 

From there, the _Chu'unthor II_ could have gone anywhere. Neither Ghent nor New Republic Intelligence had been able to track down any references to its destruction in the old Imperial files on Coruscant, yet that meant nothing. Either the Empire hadn't bothered to keep records, or they'd been destroyed over the intervening years by accident or malice. Regardless, the _Chu'unthor II_ had vanished from history, and all its inhabitants along with it. 

With the Force as her ally, she might have been able to find some trace or insight of their passage. But without it, she was blind and deaf, forced to rely on more conventional methods--well, that and Ghent's decidedly unorthodox ones.

But she came back to Bespin anyway, if only to watch the sunrise once more, as she had done a thousand times in her youth, and pretend nothing had changed. 

And then the sun shifted and the light changed once more from pink to pale blue, and the moment passed. The Cloud City traffic controllers yammered orders on the comm, shouting threats at her as if she were a Rokkan space slug and not a sentient being in her own right. 

_The only settlement for thousands of miles, and they act as if we're back on Coruscant_ , she thought with annoyance but duly complied with their directives as she began the landing cycle. 

For all her time on Bespin, she had been to Cloud City only in passing, on occasional supply runs for the _Chu'unthor II_ before the Clone Wars began in earnest. But there was nowhere in the system better to rest and refuel her ship, and she desperately needed both. And there were still a few errands for her to run during her time here. 

For an isolated mining colony in the middle of nowhere, Cloud City had attracted quite a bit of attention in the Galactic Civil War. Leia Organa and Han Solo had fled here after the Rebel Alliance's base on Hoth had been destroyed; Darth Vader had used the two of them as bait to lure a grossly unprepared Luke away from his training with Master Yoda. The Dark Lord of the Sith had trapped the fledgling Jedi in a nightmarish confrontation in the air shafts under the city. Luke had barely survived the ordeal, rescued at the last moments by the very friends he'd come to help. 

_I can't say I have fond memories of the place_ , she remembered him saying, when she'd mentioned her time on Bespin. This was back in the early days, not long after they'd left the _Eye_ and they were still getting to know one another. _But I did learn what it meant to be a Jedi. We have that much in common, at least._

She bought herself a cup of caf and an hour with the Cloud City computer systems at a tapcafe, and set to work with a vengeance. She wasn't a slicer of Ghent's caliber, and she was woefully out of practice, but you couldn't spend thirty years in a machine as complex and disingenuous as the _Eye of Palpatine_ and not pick up a few tricks. 

There were no records of any contact with the _Chu'unthor II_. That, in itself, was unsurprising. What was surprising was there was no indication that any records had been deleted or altered, even the records that should have been there from before the Clone Wars, on dates where the _Chu'unthor II_ had been in close enough to be picked up by the local satellites. As far as the city systems were concerned, the ship had never, ever existed in the first place. 

Odd. Very odd. No doubt Master Altis had sent someone to cover his tracks, and yet she ought to be able to detect any such blind spots if they were there-- 

PERHAPS I MIGHT BE OF ASSISTANCE? 

She set down her mug with a violent start as bright orange letters appeared on her terminal, wiping away her search results. The caf slopped on the table and into her lap, and in the process of cleaning it up, she realized she was being watched. 

An older human male sat at a table across the room, his blank gaze fixed in Callista's direction as if he saw multiple layers of reality at once, and the physical one was the least interesting. He wore a simple mechanic's uniform of grey coveralls with white puffy sleeves that would have let him blend in with the crowd were it not for his gleaming bald head and the Biotech Aj^6 cybernetic implant he wore wrapped around the back of his skull. 

She let out a low whistle, impressed in spite of herself. The implants been introduced just prior to the start of the Clone Wars. Both the headset and the necessary surgery were outrageously expensive, and sufficiently invasive that the company had found few buyers and nearly gone out of business. And yet this man had one, which meant he was wealthy, influential, or both. 

She turned back to the terminal, unnerved in spite of herself. IT DEPENDS ON WHAT YOU MEAN BY 'ASSISTANCE', she typed. 

YOU'RE LOOKING FOR JEDI, AREN'T YOU? 

She glanced back over at the man. He hadn't moved. 

YES. DO YOU KNOW HOW TO FIND THEM? 

COME. 

The man rose to his feet, and extended a hand out towards her. She didn't bother to log off, gulping down the rest of her caf and coming across the room to where he waited. 

Without a word, she followed him out of the tapcafe and into the corridors. 

***

He led her down a twisting maze of passages, up into the higher levels of the station, past several security checkpoints up to one of the high towers that overlooked the landing pads. None of the guards blinked when he walked past, or questioned the woman trailing at his heels. 

So she wasn't surprised when the doors opened to reveal a penthouse suite with a panoramic view and a dearth of furniture. Wide screen monitors lined the walls above and below the ring of windows that ran through the center, most of which featured secuity camera footage across the city's four hundred levels. Oddly--or perhaps not, given who she was dealing with--there was no sign of a terminal, or any computer interface of the sort typically used by humans.

The doors swished quietly shut behind her as she followed him into what could only be the office of the Baron-Administrator of Cloud City. 

"My name is Callista," she said. 

He was staring absently out the window and didn't move, but all of the monitors went black with idenical white Aurebesh characters. YES, I KNOW. 

"And you are...?" 

He turned back to face her, blinking. FORGIVE MY LACK OF MANNERS. I AM LOBOT, THE BARON-ADMINISTRATOR OF THIS CITY. 

"So I gathered," Callista said. "How did you know I was looking for Jedi?" 

I KNOW EVERYTHING THAT GOES ON IN THIS CITY. IT IS, BY DEFINITION, MY JOB. 

"It's normal for the Baron-Administrator to be a cyborg?" The words slipped out of her mouth before she could stop herself, but the question was sincere. Hopefully, he wasn't easily offended--

A faint hint of a smile. NO. I WAS AUGMENTED LONG BEFORE I ARRIVED. BUT IT DOES MAKE MY TASK EASIER. I WAS RUNNING THIS CITY IN ALL BUT NAME FOR YEARS BEFORE THE FALL OF THE EMPIRE.

She frowned, trying to remember the stories Luke had told her, the hasty introductions with a million of his friends, acquaintences, and colleagues during their convalescence on Coruscant. "You worked with Lando Calrisisian?" 

INDEED. A definite smile. HE WAS THE REASON I CAME HERE. ARE YOU A FRIEND?

"Not really," she confessed. "Friend of a friend, though." 

UNSURPRISING. LANDO IS VERY GOOD AT MAKING FRIENDS. He ran an analytic eye over her body and Callista remembered belatedly that Cray Mingla was beautiful. I EXPECT HE WOULD BE DELIGHTED TO MAKE YOUR ACQUAINTANCE. 

From what Luke had told her, that was an understatement; Lando had quite the reputation as a ladies man. "I bet. Tell me why you contacted me." 

Lobot raised an eyebrow. THE CITY COMPUTER SYSTEM FLAGGED YOU AS SOMEONE OF INTEREST. 

Of all the things he could have said, she hadn't expected that. Seeing the confusion on her face, he elaborated. YOU ARE A SIXTY PERCENT MATCH FOR A JEDI WHO CAME HERE BEFORE THE CLONE WARS. 

Even as she opened her mouth in astonishment, the screens went black, and were replaced by a series of grainy security images from a thousand different angles. She stared in wonder as the images came to life, and she watched crowds ebb and flow across an open plaza, with a black box drawing her eye to a dark-haired human woman walking hand in hand with a tall man with a single gold earring in one ear, and a lightsaber clipped to his belt. With a flash of sudden insight, she recognized both of them--

The screens froze. Half of them zoomed in on the couple, emphasizing Lobot's point. Never mind that Cray Mingla had borne no special resemblance to Callista's original body, and the presence of Callista's spirit only seemed to have altered the younger woman's hair and eye color, rather than any of the tells used for facial recognition. Somehow the computer had picked out the similarities--and that, coupled with the searches she'd used, had drawn it to the right conclusions. 

The other screens went blank. YOU ARE HER DAUGHTER, PERHAPS? 

It was an excellent guess--the only logical answer, based on the available evidence. It was even true in its own way--from a certain point of view, as Obi-wan Kenobi might say. 

"Do you know what happened to her?" she asked carefully. 

A barely perceptible shrug. SHE LEFT WHEN THE EMPIRE BEGAN AND DID NOT RETURN. THERE IS NO FURTHER FOOTAGE OF HER IN THE CITY ARCHIVES. 

"What about the other Jedi? There was a colony of them here on Bespin, a ship--the _Chu'unthor II_ \--" 

I DO NOT KNOW. THAT WAS BEFORE MY TIME. THERE IS NO MENTION OF ANY SUCH VESSEL IN THE CITY ARCHIVES. 

"Not even with administrator access?" Perhaps she didn't have the clearance to view the high-security files, but _he_ certainly did--

NO. A pause. THIS IS THE ONLY JEDI I KNOW OF. 

More security camera footage. This time, there was an older human male standing still in the corridors as the crowds rushed by him in panic. Alarms blared in the distance, and a line of stormtroopers emerged, their blasters drawn. The man winced as if in pain, and fell over, even as the soldiers drew their weapons and a woman screamed-- 

Biographical data flickered across the screens in a rush too fast for her eyes to follow, culminating in what had passed for official ID on Cloud City prior to Imperial control. She knew what it would say, though; she knew man, too. 

Streen. No last name given. A prospector, one of the many who tried their luck at tibanna gas mining, although most were hired contractors for larger companies rather than freelancers like him. And a damn good one, too, if the tallies of his bank account were accurate. 

HE FLED WHEN THE EMPIRE CAME. WHEN THEY WERE FORCED TO RELINQUISH CONTROL OF THIS PLANET, HE WOULD RETURN AT PERIODIC INTERVALS, TO SELL HIS FINDINGS AND PURCHASE SUPPLIES. ODD THINGS HAPPENED AROUND HIM, ONLY SOME OF WHICH WERE CAPTURED BY SECURITY FOOTAGE. BUT HE HAS NOT BEEN HERE FOR THE PAST THREE YEARS. 

"He left," she told him. "He lived alone in the ruins of Tibannopolis because he could hear the thoughts and feelings of his fellows and it hurt him to do so. He stayed there until a Jedi Master, Luke Skywalker, came and took him to the Academy on Yavin IV, to be his student. He's doing well there."

YOU KNOW HIM. 

"We've met." She'd never spoken much with Streen - he was so shy, so reserved, and she had been more focused on her own problems. She wished now that she had taken the time to get to know him; they had their love for this place in common. "But he's the only one you've seen? There are no others?" 

Lobot shook his head. NO SUPPORTING DATA. 

Callista drew in a deep breath. She hadn't expected to find anything, really--so why did she feel such crushing disappointment? Another dead end, another tantalizing glimpse of the past that went absolutely nowhere--

I AM SORRY I CANNOT HELP YOU FURTHER. 

"No." 

His expression didn't change, but she could tell he was startled. WHAT?

"With your permission, there's one other place I'd like to see--" 

***

The lower levels of Cloud City were not the typical tourist destination, but no one, not even the diminutive Ugnaughts workers who bustled about the huge reactor core and the carbon freezing chambers, questioned her right to be there. Doors opened automatically for her, and she stepped carefully through the tangled maze of corridors and followed the guiding lights until she stood on a maintenance balcony set across the reactor shaft that dangled from the bottom of the station like a velker's tail.

Gingerly, she leaned against the railing and looked down. From here, the shaft seemed bottomless, though she knew that a maze of tubes and tunnels ran at its base, thousands of meters below. The wind whistled in her ears, a cold blast that chilled her to the bone. 

She could only imagine how Luke must have felt, stumbling into this place in his duel with Darth Vader over a decade ago. 

Vader had forced him back, off the railing and onto the ledge that jutted off the balcony over the abyss. He'd disarmed Luke in a single blow that sent hand as well as lightsaber spiraling into the abyss. The worst wound was yet to come: as a bleeding Luke dangled one-armed on the edge, Vader had revealed himself to be his father, offering him command of the Empire in in exchange for his surrender to the Dark Side. 

Luke had refused, and let go, falling to what he had assumed would be his death. It wasn't. He'd landed on a weather shaft underneath the city, clinging to it with the last of his strength, calling out to the untrained Leia Organa (not yet Solo) through the Force. And so he'd survived. 

And now Callista had come here to see it for herself. 

She didn't know why. 

It was _Luke's_ history, not hers. She'd seen glimpses of it in his mind, back on the _Eye of Palpatine_ , but there was little of note here in and of itself to draw the eye. Any lightsaber damage had been repaired long ago, and any blood long since scrubbed away by industrious cleaning droids. Perhaps with the Force she might have felt some emotional scar, some stain or trace of that battle in the air, but as usual, her senses detected nothing out of the ordinary. 

Even Luke's hand and lightsaber were long gone, snapped up by the Emperor and included among his prized possessions--along with enough Spaarti cloning cylinders for an army--in a vast storehouse on the distant planet Wayland. Luke was, she thought with a stab of amusement, the only person whose life was as strange and twisted and improbable as her own. They'd been perfect for each other in that way, if nothing else. 

And now standing here at the site of such a pivotal moment in his life was the closest she could come to being with Luke now that their relationship was over. 

It was her choice, to insist upon their separation and on such terms. She never forgot that for a moment. Luke was wonderful, he was tender and funny and _kind_ , with a devilish sense of humor and a stubbornness that matched her own--but he couldn't help her on the path she had to walk, nor did he understand why she had chosen it. Reaching out to him now would only draw her back into darkness and despair--and take him down along with her. Even if he would follow her into hell and out again, sacrifice everything for her happiness, she couldn't let him do that. 

Luke had let go of the railing and fell, rather than turn to the Dark Side. He'd survived. She'd walked away from a comfortable life on Yavin with him, tossed away their happiness, rather than let her anger and envy and desperation draw her down. It hurt, but she would survive and so would he. 

Still, she couldn't help but wish he were here with her now, holding her close as she stared down into the abyss.

***

"No luck?" Ghent asked when she was back in hyperspace again. 

"No leads, that's for certain. You?" 

"Still running simulations," he said with a cheerfulness she envied. "Hopefully, I'll have something for you soon." 

"Have you ever thought about getting a cybernetic implant?" she asked suddenly. 

His holo-image shook his head, sending a tangle of blue-white hair in every direction. "Maybe. If they weren't so frikkin' expensive--not to mention all the surgery you have to go through. A lot of slicers have them--say it's the next best thing to being inside a computer. 'Course, then you have to worry about your wetware getting hacked, not just your external systems. Why, you want one?" 

"Oh, no... just wondering..."


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much of the imagery in this chapter is drawn from the same Theodore Roethke poem quoted in the title.

Weeks passed, and then months, sliding through her fingers like seawater. Ghent's algorithms spat out names and faces at intervals, none of them Scout. By now, she was used to being on the move, used to strange horizons and new places, to dead ends and disappointment, and the defeats barely registered. Failure was a part of life--an essential part, an unavoidable part, as Master Altis had always told her. She did her best not to take it personally. 

In the meantime, her life was her own to do as she pleased. She threw herself into her research of the Force, scanning archives in search of new directions, any tidbit that might help restore what she had lost. She meditated on tops of mountains, wandered for days on pilgrimage to ancient ruins of long-abandoned temples, made offerings to smoke-dazed oracles who spoke in riddles beyond her comprehension. She prayed and fasted until the hallucinations made her dizzy, and pushed herself to her physical limits running through lightsaber forms and other exercises from youthful training sessions on the _Chu'unthor II_ and what she had picked up from her time at the Yavin academy. Every dream was documented in case it yielded subconscious insights; every thought and flicker and sensation noticed and scrutinized. She was aware of her body and mind as she had never been before--and there was still no sign that the Force would ever return to her. 

"It's not like my brain is damaged or anything," she complained to Ghent. "The medical scans say everything is normal, and anyway, I don't think the Force _works_ in the brain, at least not in a way you can see on screen. But even Cilghal--one of Luke's students with a talent for healing--couldn't find anything wrong with me." 

He chewed at his lower lip, but said nothing. She knew him well enough by now to know he was holding back a thought with great effort. "Oh, come on, Ghent, go ahead and say it." 

He hesitated, but eventually she was able to coax it out of him. " _I_ don't think there's anything wrong with you. And I know this'll sound weird coming from me--I mean, I'm not the best at taking care of myself, I get so absorbed sometimes I forget to sleep or eat for _days_ \--but I think you're trying too hard."

She stared at him, dumbfounded. 

"Have you tried relaxing?" he said tentatively. 

"Relaxing?" she repeated with a laugh. "Well, yes. I mean, obviously--" She paused, caught herself about to fall into a lie, and laughed. "No, of course not. I think about it, and then I just kept pushing on. Even when I'm calm and focused, I'm always striving. You think that's the problem?" 

Even through the holonet, his relief was palpable. "Couldn't hurt to try."

"All right then, a vacation." That was a novel idea. Jedi Knights on active duty didn't _have_ vacations, and definitely not in wartime, and thirty years of idleness on the _Eye of Palpatine_ hardly counted as 'restful'. "Something about your tone tells me you already have a place picked out for me." 

There was no fun in embarrassing Ghent, it was too easy. "Er--you don't have to go there if you don't like it-- I mean, I thought--" 

"No, it's fine," she assured him. "Tell me." 

He sent a datapacket over the channel in lieu of a reply. When she opened it, a holographic image unfolded in three dimensions like a digital flower, whirling and spinning into a long-tailed comet, with the letters Mern and Cresh traced in delicate calligraphy across its surface. 

"What is it?" 

"It's a resort in the Trailings Sector," Ghent said. Was he blushing? Oh, yes, he was blushing. "It's carved out of a comet in the Mulako system, only open for a few months every hundred years approaching perihelion when it develops breathable atmosphere. The rest of the time, they mine it for ice."

"Ice?" 

He waved a dismissive hand. "Primordial water. It's a thing. Rich people think it's better because it's never been through anyone else before they drink it. Karrde thought about working with them a while back, had me run up all the accounts and scenarios to see if it was worth the trouble. Water is _heavy_ , though; it ended up being too much work for too little reward. That's how I know about it." 

"Ghent, I can't--" 

"I'm not--trying to presume anything here, computer lady." His blush, already impressive against the waxy blue tinge of holonet imaging, deepened further. "I hold you in the highest possible regard. I don't want to come off as--creepy or anything. But if you want my opinion--you deserve the best, and it doesn't get any better than this. You're so beautiful and accomplished--you'll fit right in among all the high society folk. They'd _love_ to have a scientist of Dr. Mingla's caliber among their guests." 

"I'm _not_ her--" That was only partially true; for all legal purposes, she _was_ Cray Mingla, even if she didn't like to admit it. 

"They don't know that." 

She opened her mouth and closed it again. He was right. She'd used Cray's identity in far more troubled circumstances -- why not this one? Why was she balking at a little luxury? A well-deserved rest? 

"All right," she said with a rueful smile, holding up her hands in surrender. "You got me. How do I make a reservation?" 

He punched a button on his terminal. "Done." 

"It was that easy?" She ought to have known from his tone that he'd been planning this, or something very much like it. Subtlety wasn't one of Ghent's strong points. 

"I make it easy." The pride was evident in his voice. "I hope you like it." 

"Ghent?" she said. 

"Yes?" 

"I'm so glad you're my friend." 

"Me, too, computer lady. Me, too." 

***

Her first sight as she brought _Saints Ascending_ out of hyperspace into the Mulako system was the comet spread out in front of her in a bright streak across the darkness. She gasped in wonder. For a moment, she hung suspended in space and the universe narrowed to her pounding heartbeat and the wandering plume of ice that filled the viewscreens--and then the Mulako Corporation homing beacon kicked in, jolting her back to the present. With a whirring click, the navcomputer locked on, and the ship descended. 

As the yacht drew closer, the frosted flowers that decorated the comet's surface were revealed as geysers belching gas and ice clouds twisted by the lack of gravity into convoluted shapes. Giant cranes in the distance toiled away, swinging to and fro as they hauled blocks of ice to loading platforms. Then the ship dipped down into a cavernous opening suffused with multicolored lights. Warm yellows and reds alternated with darker purples and a dull matted black that she suspected was ultraviolet for species whose vision stretched beyond the typical human spectrum. The distinctive Mern-Cresh logo was tastefully emblazoned on every available surface. 

She had never seen anything like it--and according to Ghent, that was precisely the point. "It's for people who find beauty in transiency--" 

"Now you're a poet as well as a slicer," she'd teased. 

He blushed all the way to the roots of his hair. She was enjoying this far too much. 

"-- _And_ have a healthy bank account," he finished. 

"So how am I paying for this?" 

"You're not. I--pulled a few strings. Nothing illegal, don't worry," he added hastily, as if to ward off the inevitable follow-up. "But what's the point of being Crypt Chief if I can't have a little fun?" 

This was true. She hadn't considered what the New Republic must be paying Ghent for his services. He could probably afford to retire on his Delta Source commission alone. Now that the conflict with the Empire was settling down, General bel Iblis could afford to be generous. And she didn't have the heart to argue with him when it so clearly made him happy. 

So she stepped into the hangar bay in a much lighter mood and followed the porter droid through the maze of curving corridors carved out of the ice. Every exposed surface was covered with an impermeable clear barrier suffused with the same patterns of colored lights she had seen on the way in. The effect was heightened by the gentle mist that softened the thousands of rainbows in every direction as the glow-lamps difracted through the crystalline structure of the ice. 

Despite the medium, the temperature and the ambience was tropical. Elaborate fountains loomed out of the lush foliage that lined the walkways, with humidity to rival Yavin IV. The droid led her past discreet alcoves marking exclusive restaurants and lounges, parroting pre-recorded advertisements that she ignored in favor of watching her step. The comet's gravity was much lower than standard, and she couldn't shake the thought that one careless slip would send her airborne. 

Only when she had reached her suite and the droid departed did she snap out of her trance. As in the corridors, fountains were everywhere, but the tropical foliage had been replaced by furniture carved out of solid rock and padded with soft white fur that matched the rug splayed out in front of an elaborate waterfall centerpiece. 

She explored the massive suite further. The bedroom was the size of an entire raft on Chad, and the 'fresher was nearly as large. The steaming tub in the corner would not have been out of place in one of the private baths at the Jedi Academy's hot springs, with plenty of temperature-controlled waterfalls along every wall. 

She stripped without hesitation, seized by a sudden eagerness to wash away the sweat and grime and disappointment of her travels. She'd learned on Yavin that hot water couldn't solve her problems--but it certainly didn't hurt. 

***

There was so much to do at the Mulako Corporation Cometary Resort--surface tours, fancy dinners, every conceivable luxury--and none of it appealed to her. Instead, she kept to her rooms, ordered her meals delivered, floated naked in the tub, and let her thoughts drift where they would, soothed by the continuous music of flowing water. After so much effort and pain, it was a relief to simply _be_ , with no demands on her time and no one disturbing her peace. 

She reveled in the abundance, especially of water. It was calm and controlled here, instead of the slick, dark treachery of the oceans of Chad. She loved her home planet, but she could never relax there. Here, though, there was no fear or suffering, only comfort and ease. The sensation was transient, perhaps, like so much in her life. But for now, it was enough. 

Ghent was right, she thought. She'd pushed herself far too hard, too much, too fast, driven by her desperation to recapture the Force. She ought to have known better, should have remembered that the Force was quicksilver bright and swift to flee from too much striving. Born of life, the Force itself was alive, and would not flourish in a body or mind too tense and too tight, too fixed and certain of itself. She had to let go and trust-- 

And then whatever insight she had was gone, and she was shaking and sputtering in the bath, clumsy and solid and all too human, when she should have been graceful and light and something more. Steam curled around her, drifting between the partially translucent walls of ice, and she was alone, cut off from the warmth and guidance of the universe. 

Luke would have loved it here. So much water. So much beauty. 

She buried her face in her hands and cried. 

***

Djinn Altis had many tests for his students, but there was only one test that loomed above all others in their minds, and now it was her turn at last. She must walk into the darkness and face herself, in order to find out who she truly was. "Only then can you truly be an asset to others," he told her. 

"That doesn't seem so hard." She was seventeen, on the cusp of womanhood, eager and ready for any challenge. She had trained every day with him for seven years now. Her next question was inspired by curiosity and a healthy dose of anticipation, rather than fear: "But how can I see so clearly in the dark?" 

Djinn Altis smiled. "It is in dark times and places that the eye begins to see. Even if I could explain it, you must still experience for yourself." 

She nodded. She'd learned long ago to trust and wait when confronted with a paradox; this was no exception. 

"All Jedi do this in one form or another, but over the years, I've come to prefer this version over all the others," Master Altis continued. Callista had never heard him speak ill of the Coruscant-based Jedi, but she suspected this might be yet another way in which her master's practice differed from theirs. "The self may be an illusion, but it's an addictively compelling one. Only by knowing it fully can we move beyond its limitations instead of being bound by them. Only by knowing ourselves can we empty ourselves most fully to the Force." 

"How do I do that?" she asked. A faint tremor of uncertainty wound through her voice and she flushed, mortified at the slip. She'd been warned many times over the years of the perils of the Dark Side--and now, to face it directly--

He spread his hands, leathered and gnarled with age, but his smile was brilliant and his eyes were kind. "I will show you. Come." 

They took a shuttle from the _Chu'unthor II_ out to an old mining platform hovering in the clouds. It had been abandoned a few years earlier, but decay had already set in, and was eerily dark on the shuttle's sensors. A host of rawwks angrily flew up in disarray their passing disturbed their rookery, and then all was quiet again. 

Night was falling fast by the time they landed, and a thick mist had set in as the two of them made their way onto the platform. Exposed now to atmosphere, a brisk wind amplified the cold far beyond the readings on the shuttle thermometer. Callista shivered involuntarily and squared her shoulders, tilting her head back to try and catch a glimpse of the star-specked sky above. No luck. 

"I will wait here for you," Master Altis said, folding his legs in meditation posture as he settled down against a nearby bulkhead. "Take as much time as you need. And I suggest you leave your lightsaber here with me." 

She blinked in surprise. "No weapons?" 

"No weapons." 

Well, if that was how it was, so be it. With a sigh, she unhooked the lightsaber from her belt and tossed it to him. He caught it out of the air with ease and placed it on his lap with a nod of satisfication. 

"Remember, child, darkness and light are two sides of the same coin. Go far enough inward and you emerge at the end of the universe--go far enough outward and you come back to your own heart. Go out, and what you seek will find you. It's been waiting for a long time. " 

He closed his eyes, and the conversation was over. She turned away, adift in a sea of vapor as the clouds deepened around her and a few errant rawwks settled noisily in their roosts. Taking a deep breath, she began to pick her way forward across the platform. 

Her caution was justified. Gaping holes and fallen mining equipment were frequent hazards, jumbled together by fierce windstorms. The ground creaked and wobbled under her feet, as if it would crumble underneath her at any moment. A high keening sound in the distance made her tense, her entire body crackling with nervous tension. 

"Hello?" she called out, wondering if she might stumble across some eccentric miner or castaway out here in the middle of nowhere--or worse. "Is anyone there?" 

She reached out with the Force, but felt nothing living, only a deep, penetrating cold that washed out all of her senses. She set her lips and kept going. Even without obstacles, every move forward was an effort, as if something in this place was fighting her. _If only I could see further than my hand in front of me--_

As if on cue, a tall silhouette loomed out of the clouds to her right, and she swung towards it, grateful for a direction. It reminded her of the forests she'd seen on her travels to other worlds, though she didn't believe for a moment it actually was. How could there possibly be a tree here, with no soil to anchor it, on a platform suspended hundreds of miles above the planet's core? She didn't know much about trees, but she'd never seen one on Bespin before and this seemed a particularly unlikely place for one. 

As she drew closer, it was clear that it was a tree after all, a vast spreading conifer with feathery needles that reminded her of the great uneti grove at the Jedi outpost on Nejaa VII. A darkened shadow slumped against its base, but she couldn't make out what it was at this distance. The keening grew louder, as if the tree itself were crying in the wind--

Ten meters away, she recognized shadow and sound for what they was: a woman sobbing, her hands wrapped against the trunk as she clung to the tree for comfort. At Callista's approach, the woman raised her head--and her cry broke off as she froze. 

So did Callista. This was no stranger. Somehow, impossibly, she was staring at _herself_ \--

With a shriek, her double fled. 

Callista ran after her. 

Even as she leaped into action, the tree was replaced by a towering crane sagging from the sheer weight of air-plankton trapped in its scaffolding. She barely had time to register the transformation before she was past it, tearing round an unexpected corner after her doppelganger.

She stumbled forward over a crack in the platform, only for the next segment to give way beneath her with a whining squeal. On instinct, she reached out, trusting the Force not to let her fall--and rose upward, only to crumple with a thud on more solid ground a few meters away. 

She didn't stop to contemplate the brush with death or consider her injuries. A heartbeat later, she was up and running again, breath ragged in her ears. 

Time slowed to a crawl. There was no place for fear, no place for thought, only the sudden rush of adrenaline as the chase continued. She couldn't afford to think if she was going to survive. She pelted forward, dodging old gas barrels and crumbling scanning grids, skidding over the rooftops of prefabricated housing shacks that had somehow managed to stay intact. Her double was lucky and clever, she'd give her that--but Callista was better. She was going to catch up with her, and figure out just what was going on--

Rawwks swarmed around her in consternation as she slammed through another rookery, clawing at her face. She beat away at the avians with her fists, but they didn't stop and neither did she. She jumped over a huge block of rubble that fell in her path, and kept going until the rawwks gave up, wondering how the hell her double had managed to get past the rawwks without upsetting them--

\--and then she heard footsteps behind her. Somehow the double had gotten _behind_ her--

She whirled. The double halted for a moment, caught in mid-stride as she stared at Callista with terror-stricken eyes. Even as Callista took a step forward, the chase began anew. 

Her heart pounded and her muscles ached. She clambered over abandoned rigs and more rickety platforms, leaped over gaps and crevices, and dodged rawwks and rocks alike amidst the clouds and wind. Then she staggered to a stop as the double perched on the platform's edge a few meters away. Pinned between her persuer and the abyss, she keened wildly in despair. 

_Don't be frightened, I won't hurt you,_ Callista wanted to say, but she couldn't make her mouth work right and no words came out. She reached for her double, even as the double twisted away in fear and fell tumbling into darkness--

Callista stared in shock, her mouth open. _Why? Why had she--_?

There was a creaking on the platform behind her. Her spine tingled. She knew what she would see even before she turned. 

Her double, waiting for her. 

Callista ran. The double ran, too. Every time Callista thought she was on the cusp of victory and it would over soon, the double slipped behind her, evading her grasp. _How is this even possible?_ she thought, panic swelling through her. _What am I missing--?_

And then it hit her in a flash of insight, and she stopped. The double wasn't ahead of her anymore, it was behind her. She turned. 

Sure enough, the double had stopped, too. 

Without dropping her gaze from the double's face, she took a few steps forward. The double moved with her, maintaining the distance between them. 

Whatever Callista did, so did the other. 

They were linked. She was, quite literally, chasing _herself_. And so was the double. 

She knew then what she had to do. 

She reached out a open hand in invitation and held it out to the double. And waited. 

This time, the double didn't move. 

Callista frowned, but held herself steady. Then, careful to keep her hand extended, she took a few steps forward. 

Still no reaction from the double. 

"I am complete as I am. Nothing is missing," Callista whispered. "But if you want, you can come with me."

As if it had been waiting for the invitation, the double crept slowly towards her with tentative, jerking steps, prepared at any moment to take flight. Callista stood still, her gaze never leaving the double's face as the distance closed between them. Her heartbeat thudded in her ears as the double tentatively extended a hand out to her. Their fingers brushed--

\--and then she was alone on the platform, the clouds dense and thick around her, the wind screaming around her in the same pitch as her double's cries. 

She stood there in the darkness for a long time, lost in thought. 

***

Was it only a dream? 

Back on the shuttle, Master Altis laughed when she brought up the possibility. "No more a dream than the rest of your life, I think," he said, not unkindly. 

"So that was the test," she said, leaning back into the co-pilot's chair. "Did I fail?" 

"Do you think you failed?" 

She thought for a while as the clouds snaked around the shuttle, obscuring the view. It didn't matter; the autopilot didn't need to see to fly the shuttle properly. Silence stretched out between them, and she knew he would give her all the time in the world to consider her answer. 

"I don't know," she said at last. "I thought she might--I thought she might come with me. If I hadn't chased her--if I hadn't scared her--would she?" 

"Well, that's something to consider for next time," Master Altis said with a smile. 

She sat bolt upright in her seat, startled beyond measure. "What do you mean, 'next time'--?" 

"Ah, child, child," Master Altis said, shaking his head in amusement. "Our whole _lives_ are a test. It never stops. I have no doubt you'll meet again, in some form or another. But there will be times when there is nothing you can do to change what happens--you can only accept it--" 

***

_Sometimes, there is nothing you can do--_

The world spun around her in a blur. With a gasp, she flung herself out of the hot tub and onto the floor of the 'fresher, overcome with sudden dizziness. Lost in her reverie, she'd nearly fallen asleep in the bath and damn near overheated. She crawled to the nearest waterfall and plunged her head plunged her head into the shockingly cold stream, letting the chill revive her.

Fortunately, this had happened often enough to her in the Yavin hot springs that she didn't panic, only knelt with her head down until the dizziness passed, splashing the cold water on her as best she could. All of it was primordial water that had never passed through a sentient before. She was bathing in a fortune. 

That thought made her laugh, and then she couldn't stop, giddy as she was. She rocked back and forth, as the tears streamed down her face, and she was laughing and sobbing in equal measures--for herself, for her teachers, friends, and partners, everything she'd ever loved and cherished in her strange and tangled life. 

When the spasms passed, she sat up and squeezed the water out of her hair as best she could. There were no mirrors in the 'fresher, but she didn't need one. Like everywhere else in the resort, the walls were carved out of the ice, reflecting her image back to her with a thousand rainbows. As Lobot had pointed out on Cloud City, her face was an odd mixture of Cray Mingla's features and the ones her spirit had worn for so many years. 

A cloud of mist passed in front of her face, momentarily obscuring the reflection. For a second, she was back on that Bespin mining platform, so many years before. 

Tentatively, she stretched out a hand towards the wall. Her reflection did the same. The fingers met, and held--but neither of them could reach the other. The translucent barrier stood between them, preventing them from meeting. 

_Sometimes there is nothing you can do._

She'd said as much to Luke, back on the _Eye of Palpatine_ , when he'd insisted that there had to be a way for her to survive the ship's destruction. He hadn't listened to her, had been so desperate to save her at the expense of their mission, Cray had been forced to stun him and drag him into an escape pod so they could finish the job. Later, on Yavin, he'd been so certain that her powers would return--that they'd find a way to make it happen somehow, no matter what--

"Callista, we'll try it. Whatever it is, we'll try it, we can get it back, Callista, I promise, it's you I love not the Force in you--"

She hadn't believed him. Not because she thought he lied--he was terrible at lying, especially if you knew what to look for--but because _she_ hadn't loved _herself_ without the Force--

 _Sometimes there is nothing you can do._

She knew, deep in her heart that the Force wasn't coming back to her. She could run and run as much as she wanted, but she would be no closer to her goal than when she started, just as it had been in her test. 

"I am complete as I am," she whispered to her reflection. "Nothing is missing, but if you want, you can come with me." 

For a long time, the only sound was the susurration of flowing water and the quiet rise and fall of her breath. 

For the first time in a long while, she was at peace. 

***

A blinking red light on the couch in the main suite alerted her to a new comm message from Ghent. It was short and simple: _Try this_ , followed by a string of data and coordinates. 

She drew up the file with trepidation, bracing herself once again for disappointment. But to her surprise, she found herself nodding in agreement. Scout might--just _might_ \--actually be there this time. 

The place was a hell-realm. A former penal colony on a low-tech backwater dominated by ignorance, superstition, and bad weather, with absolutely nothing to recommend it. Even after the Empire's dissolution, few settlers had come, not that the survivors wanted the company. They were, in fact, fanatic about enforcing their privacy. 

But it was the last place an Inquisitor would have thought to look for errant Jedi. 

An hour later, she was back in the pilot's chair of the _Saints Ascending_ , ready to make the jump to hyperspace. She punched in the coordinates without a second thought and let the starlines carry her away.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Callista's vision of her double weeping under an uneti tree is a callout to Theodore Roethke's "lord of nature weeping to a tree" and [a scene in _A Natural History of Tatooine_](https://atamascolily.tumblr.com/post/179756277273/a-natural-history-of-tatooine-part-30) where she does just that.


	5. Chapter 5

_Nam Chorios_. A flicker of memory: Master Altis's tales of a fabled planet, strong in the Force, sought centuries ago by two young Jedi who hoped to uncover its secrets. A fairy tale, a legend, a metaphor, not history... or was it? 

The story had lodged in her mind because one of those Jedi had been a Hutt. She'd thought that unlikely at the time and said as much. 

Djinn Altis raised an eyebrow. "So therefore it can't be true?"

Eleven-year-old Callista hesitated, sensing a trap. "No..." 

"All things are possible with the Force, even unlikely ones," Djinn Altis said, not bothering to hide a smile. " _Anything_ can happen. And often does." 

So when Ghent's computations conjured up that name, it was not far-fetched to think that Scout might have gone there.

The Y-wing was a two-seater, identical to the one she and Geith had flown to the _Eye of Palpatine_ except for the scorch marks. Space for a passenger was essential if Scout came back with her, and the manufacturer hadn't bothered to upgrade the controls since before the Clone Wars; she could fly this model in her sleep. This particular ship was was still a little rusty around the edges after decades in a junkyard off of Sluis Van, but it was smaller and more agile than her shuttle and it would do well enough for the journey she had in mind. 

"Sorry I can't get you a more specific address this time," the slicer said into her headset as she brought the Y-wing around towards the dusty brown planet still a thousand kilometers in the distance. "Lucky for us, there are less than a million human settlers on Nam Chorios and no indigenous life forms, so there's a seventeen percent chance we can find Scout within a year with random chance alone." 

"I hope we can be smarter than that," Callista said, checking the navcomputer to make sure the coordinates for Hweg Shul were ready. 

"Hey, when you consider the size of the galaxy, I think we're doing a pretty good job. And it hasn't even been two years yet--!" 

She fiddled with the console. "How did you find this place? Your usual algorithm?" 

"Oh, well, mostly..." Pride filled Ghent's voice; he always enjoyed recounting his technological triumphs. "I added Djinn Altis to the calculations as another variable, as well as any blind spots like the one you detected in the Cloud City computer system on Bespin." 

"Does that really work?" 

"Well enough. You don't look for the thing itself, you look for the absence of it, to see if anyone's trying to cover their tracks. It's a pretty sophisticated slicing job to erase something completely, and it leaves holes in the code if you know what to look for." 

She'd done similar things in the _Eye of Palpatine_ 's computers, to fool the system into ignoring her activities. It wasn't so different from the classic Jedi trick of manipulating minds to pass unseen when the need called for it. But to stitch all these discrete searches together into a coherent trail without the Force was impressive. Ghent was doing with logic and millions of computer searches what she had once done with insight, intuition, and a healthy dose of luck. 

"And that combination brought you to Nam Chorios?" Callista said aloud, mostly to distract herself. 

"Not directly. Once I input all those probabilities and inferences, the algorithm eventually spat out a series of planets in this corner of the Meridian sector. On local history, this place seemed the most likely of the lot to be her ultimate destination."

She agreed with that conclusion. Forty years ago, rumor had it that the popular Republic statesman Seti Ashgad had been kidnapped and stranded on that isolated and unapproachable planet by agents of his political foe, the then-Senator Palpatine. Based on Palpatine's later history, those rumors had probably been true. Combined with Master Altis' mythic tales of Jedi Knights errant, its history as a dumping ground for undesirables, and its distance from the galactic core, Nam Chorios could well have been a compelling destination for a young Jedi on the run in dark times. 

The dusty tan ball of the planet, grew larger and larger and until it filled the viewscreens. The small faint flickers of Nam, the system's only star, winked out as she curved around towards the night side, shrouding her descent in darkness. 

As if on cue, the gunfire began. 

"It's crazy," Ghent said in her ear. "There's nothing on this dustball that anyone would want. Why are they defending it?" 

The Y-wing buckled as a blast hit her forward deflector shields. "No more talk, Ghent, I gotta concentrate," she said, switching off the comm and sending the Y-wing spiraling into a deep dive to avoid the steady stream of cannon fire directed at her. 

Seven centuries ago, the ruling Grissmath Dynasty in the Meridian system had shipped their political prisoners to Nam Chorios, setting automated gun stations all over the planet to ensure no escape was possible. But the ultimate joke was on the oppressors: they perished along with their homeworld two centuries later in a nuclear accident, while the descendants of the original prisoners continued to scratch out a living as best they could on the dry, rocky wastes of their adopted world. 

Aside from dumping Seti Ashgad and who knows how many other prisoners there to rot, the Empire hadn't bothered with the place. Aside from an outpost on neighboring Pedducis Chorios, their presence in the sector had been minimal. Nam Chorios had been left to its own devices, and the inhabitant liked their independence enough to reject a motion to join the New Republic two years earlier. The lack of open borders hadn't stopped miners and prospectors from Pedducis Chorios and other local NR systems from showing up, determined to extract a living as best they could from the abundant mineral deposits the Oldtimers had left untouched. 

But the Newcomers' efforts to pull Nam Chorios into the wider galaxy by semi-legal commerce had been severely hampered by the Theran Listeners, followers of a religious movement whose first precept forbade contact with the outside world. Crucially, the Listeners had taken control of the old gun stations, and would fire at any ship spotted in the atmosphere, so that nothing smaller than a starfighter could get through. 

Hence the Y-wing. The shuttle she'd used before was not maneuverable enough to handle this kind of high-level dogfight, and she wasn't about to risk her life on it. It waited for her alongside the _Saints Ascending_ , both of which she had prudently left on the outskirts of the system. 

More firepower rained down, as the pattern shifted from automated systems to a more human touch. After so long in the _Eye of Palpatine_ 's gunnery, she knew the difference when she saw it. Whoever the Theran Listeners were, they wanted her dead and were going to great lengths to ensure it. 

Ghent was right. The whole thing was crazy, from start to finish. What the hell was so special about Nam Chorios that made the Theran Listeners want to defend it so badly from outsiders? When they weren't trying to kill any visitors, they wandered around the desert holding conversations with rocks. None of it made any sense. 

Though given her years of service to a splinter group of a religious order dedicated to an unseen, unifying Force, who was she to criticize? At the least the Listeners could _talk_ to their gods. 

Maybe they could hear something she couldn't. 

She reached out and opened herself to the Force, calling out to Scout and whatever else might be waiting for her on this world. In her mind, she sang a lullaby for the trigger-happy Listeners at the gun stations, soothing them as she would a child. _Hush, hush. Peace, peace. Let me pass. I'm not trying to hurt you._

If anything, the gunfire only intensified.

She sighed. It was so foolish of her to hope, after all this time. Why was she even trying? 

Because, she realized with a pang, Master Altis had told her once that hope, too, could sometimes affect the Force. And hope was all she had left now, the only resource she hadn't yet exhausted. 

She hoped he was right about that. She hoped for a lot of things: finding Scout, regaining her Force powers, surviving the next few minutes--

She threw herself into that last task with gusto, dodging and twisting the Y-wing as the barrage continued. 

***

She didn't have much attention to spare for the scenery, but the jagged teeth of crystal mountains and the vast empty wastes of broken rock were impossible to miss as she veered back towards the day side, even at a thousand kilometers an hour. 

"Day" was a relative term, of course. Even at highest noon, the light from the sun was dim and faint, and a faint haze of stars flickered in the background. Yet what faint light there was refracted through thousands of prisms, shimmering and blinding in every direction. The crystals blazed so brilliantly there was no room for shadow across the vast open plains at the mountains' feet, only a smoky glow that suffused everything with its brightness. 

Callista swore as her goggles took too long to adapt, leaving her flying blind at the worst possible second. For a heart-stopping moment, she was forced to rely on raw instinct to avoid smashing into a crystal-rock chimney that her sensors screamed was there before her goggles shifted and her vision abruptly returned. 

She gasped again, this time in wonder. Towering cliffs plummeted hundreds of meters to dry arroyos that had never seen a drop of water in millennia; twisted slate boulderfields were punctuated by dense clusters of shining crystals, with no scrap of vegetation or animals in sight. This was a desert world, a barren hunk of rock floating in dusky, indifferent to life in any of its myriad forms. 

She heard nothing from the Force, only the screaming wind as she zipped over the wasteland. The distant fire of guns behind her warned her not to be complacent. Just because she'd cleared the last station at Bleak Point didn't mean she was necessarily out of range. 

As she crested the next ridgeline, the gunfire faded, and she let herself relax at last. A dense cluster of buildings came into view, centered around the graceful curve that marked an underground water seam and the pitifully small patches of green that hugged its edges. Hweg Shul, capital of Nam Chorios, wasn't more than a village by Core standards, but it was the closest thing to civilization in these parts, and she was very glad to be here. 

The Theran habit of opening fire on any vessel over a certain size meant that smugglers were an important part of the local economy in Newcomer settlements. Her comm signal was warmly greeted by directions to a spacious landing pad on the outskirts of the settlement. Even as she descended from the fighter, a host of local merchants appeared in a ragtag assortment of patched-up speeders, eager for the cargo of medpaks, repulsors, and spare parts she'd jammed into the Y-wing's passenger seat. After a few rounds of haggling and the settling of accounts, she was surprised to discover she'd made a tidy profit on this trip along with a convincing cover. 

That fresh influx of credits made her a popular figure at the Blue Blerd of Happiness Tavern when she stopped in for a drink an hour later. Her throat ached from the parched air and negotiations, but her real thirst was information. For a round of drinks on the house, the patrons of the Blerd were all too happy to comply. 

Like most of the buildings in this section of Hweg Shul, the tavern was perched several meters off the ground on spindly stilts that were fortunately stronger than they looked. It had the air of a temporary shack at Billdog Village back on Chad, yet she doubted floods were involved. A mystery. 

There were bugs, too--lots of them. Tiny and purplish brown with far too many legs for comfort, they skittered along the densest shadows, vanishing underneath the bar and out of her sight as she settled down with a mug of the local homebrew. 

"Drochs," said the white-haired older woman next to her, following Callista's gaze. She rolled up a leg of her coveralls to show the ring of round red bites that peppered her lower thigh. "Everybody gets 'em. Hurts like hell, but sunlight kills 'em and helps the wounds heal. Just stay out of the shadows and do your best to keep clean and you'll be fine." 

She offered Callista a calloused hand. "Umolly Darm. Thanks for the drink." 

Callista returned the gesture. "Cray Mingla. Pleasure's all mine. What's with the stilts on this place?" 

"Oh, that's for ground lightning," Umolly Darm said with a matter-of-fact air, and took a long swig of her liquor. 

"What?" Callista said uncertainly, wondering if the older woman was trying to pull a fast one on her. "How's _that_ work?" 

"Oh, you're new here, you won't have seen it yet. They seem to start either in the mountains or from those crystal chimney formations-- _tsils_ , the Oldtimers call them--out on the wastelands once or twice a week. Damned nuisance they are--not usually lethal, but they hurt like hell, and they make all the electronics go haywire for a couple hours afterward. The Oldtimers don't trying to raise their houses-- after a storm passes, they just shake themselves off and keep going like nothing happened. But they're strange folk, the Oldtimers. No telling what they'll do sometimes." 

"I used to hate the ground lightning," an older man sniffed from down the bar, "but then I heard some of the Oldtimers' stories of Force storms, and then it didn't seem so bad in comparison." He was even more grizzled than Umolly, and his battered coveralls suggested he was a prospector who had yet to find a winning claim. 

Callista's ears perked up. "Force storms?" she repeated, trying to contain her excitement. 

"Ahhhh, yes. The Oldtimers say they were terrible--and they don't get riled up by much, so you know they must have been _awful_. They say nothin' stayed still if it wasn't nailed down. Dishes would fly right off the table, and furniture would smash through walls, as if the wind were howling, but there weren't never any wind. Speeders would get battered to pieces by flying boulders, and fire'd leap up right in your face and burn you to death. No way to know when they might happen, or defend yourself if they did." He shook his head in disgust. "Terrible. Just terrible." 

"The last ones were thirty years ago, according to the stories," Umolly Darn agreed with a respectful nod in the prospector's direction. "That was before my time, of course, but even the Listeners don't know how they started or what they really were about. Certainly, we've never seen anything like 'em since, but I've seen the wreckage out in some of the older settlements and I've never seen any storm here that could cause that kind of damage." 

This seemed like a good time to inquire about the Therans. "What's their deal, anyway? Why do they hate outsiders so much?" 

A shrug. Another swig of alcohol. "Who knows?" Umolly Darn spat. "Most of 'em are farm kids from the Oldtimer settlements, off on some rite of passage or another for a few seasons before returning home with someone they met in the desert and settling down for good. They have their rituals with smoke and dreams where they hear voices from the rocks or whatever it is they claim is out there talkin' to 'em and mostly keep to themselves. There are settlements up in the canyons or in caves, anywhere where there's water close to the surface, but mostly they move in bands, never spending the night in the same place twice. There's always a good number out at the gun stations. They never leave 'em alone, ever. Some folks have tried to take 'em by Force, but those guns are workin' just fine and they do a lot of damage. Never ends well.

"But the Oldtimers like 'em. They think they're holy, and they do whatever Listeners say the voices in the rocks want them to do. They say the tech they have was good enough for their ancestors, and it's good enough for them, and they don't want nothin' else. ' _We_ don't like it,' they always say when you ask 'em why, as if they speak for everyone. Ha!" Another gob of spit in the well-used spittoon on the bar. "Just becase they live like animals doesn't mean the rest of us want to." 

Callista sympathized--it was why she'd brought so many medpaks as cargo in the Y-wing--but had no intention of getting caught up in local quarrels. She brought up a holo on her wrist monitor with the same image of Scout at fourteen that she had first shown to Ghent, carefully cropped to remove all traces of the lightsaber. "You ever seen a woman like this before?" 

The prospector squinted over Umolly's shoulder. "You some sort of bounty hunter or somethin'?" 

"She's my mother," Callista lied, mentally thanking Lobot for the cover story. "She had me when she was just a kid herself, put me up for adoption the day after I was born. I think she might have come to Nam Chorios to get away from some trouble. Figured it was time I came to see for myself if that was true." 

He shifted on his stool. "Must be forty-somethin', fifty years old now." 

"Yeah. This is the only holo I got. Didn't say it was gonna be easy." 

They pondered this truth in silence for a while. Callista took a sip of the black-speckled brew in her mug and wished she hadn't. If the patrons of the Blerd enjoyed this swill, they were more than welcome to it. 

"Huh," Umolly Darn said at last. "Tell ya what. You should try talkin' to the Healer in the Old Lady's House. If anyone would know, she would." 

"Healer?" she repeated in confusion. 

"Yeah. Not much in the way of medical care here, but she does what she can, though it's far from official-like. She treats Oldtimers and Newcomers alike. They say she knows _everybody_." 

"She fixed my shoulder when I slipped and nearly dislocated it," the grizzled man chimed in. "Didn't ask no fee, either. Good woman." 

Callista caught her breath. "Can you give me directions?" 

They could. 

***

Night had fallen by the time she reached her destination, on the outskirts of the Oldtimer section of Hweg Shul. In keeping with the neighborhood, the house was built at ground level out of smooth white stone. Unlike them, however, it was ringed by a smooth-lined wall, towering several meters above her head, with a wrought-durasteel gate that hung ajar with rusted hinges marking the only way in or out. The path up to the house itself was dominated by the luxuriant growth of plants--not just the standard vegetation common to low-light terraformed planets, but rarer shrubs and trees watered by a complex series of irrigation tubes to stunning effect. 

Whoever lived here is a force to be reckoned with, Callista though, as she ventured through the lush courtyard to knock on the front door. 

No sensors, no doorbells, not a hint of movement from the inside. "Hello?" she called. "Is anyone there?" 

The only response was a scratching on the stones behind her. She whirled in sudden panic, the yellow gleam of her lightsaber pulsing in her hands with a crackling hum. 

But she saw nothing, only the gentle rocking of branches in the wind above her head. 

She turned back to the door, frowning, unwilling to extinguish her blade even if she couldn't articulate the reason. It pulsed in the darkness with a brilliant glow. 

The scratching came again. This time, she looked down at her feet. Tiny drochs ran in agitated circles as they fled for the shadows, their legs scraping against the stone with that same eerie sound. 

She laughed in relief, and extinguished the blade, resolving to return in the morning when the house's inhabitants might be awake. She had only gotten a few steps from the door when something dark and heavy dropped onto her back with a fierce hiss, knocking her to her knees. 

She didn't stop to think. There wasn't time. She rolled over on her back in an attempt to dislodge the creature, even as chitinous legs drove themselves through her flight suit and into her skin. She screamed and bucked forward, smashing whatever-it-was into the ground, but she couldn't shake it free, and she couldn't get a clear swing with her lightsaber at this angle. She ignited the blade anyway and flung her left arm over her head as she whipped the lightsaber around with her right hand. 

Her gambit worked. She hit chitin instead of her own flesh and the creature screamed in her ear and let go, twitching beside her on the ground. She was on her feet in a flash, slashing downward, and the screaming stopped as two solid pieces of dark exoskeleton collapsed in a heap beneath her.

For the second time that evening, she stood with her lightsaber buzzing in her hands, breathing wildly. 

And again, she wasn't alone. 

"Who are you?" A woman's voice, low and familiar, behind her. "A Jedi? After all this time?" 

Callista wobbled as she turned, unable to control her shaking. The doorway to the Old Lady's House was open, a glowlamp in the entranceway casting the scene a phosphorescent green that violently clashed with the topaz gleam of her lightsaber. A veiled figure stood before her, hidden under the immense bulk of a battered red coat, shorter than she was by half a dozen centimeters. 

"Scout?" she whispered.

The woman froze, one black-gloved hand caught in the act of pushing away the veils that wrapped her face. It was the only tell Callista needed. 

"Scout, do you remember me? I taught you a sweeping side cut the first day you came to the _Chu'unthor II_ with Master Altis. You told me once you'd won a tournament at the Jedi Temple on Coruscant by latching onto a training lightsaber with you bare hands, and I showed you how to counter it if someone ever played that trick on you. You laughed, and told me that no one would ever be stupid enough to do that in a real battle, but we practiced it all the same--" 

Her mouth moved without instruction from her mind, babbling like an idiot from the adrenaline. All this time and effort to find Scout, and she'd never thought of what she would say when they met at last--

And what _could_ she say, that wouldn't make her sound crazy--unhinged--desperate--

_All things are possible with the Force, even unlikely ones,_ Master Altis had said. But would Scout believe that? 

For a long moment, they stared at each other. Callista couldn't see the other woman's eyes through the tangled mass of veils. Nor could she feel the Force probe Scout was no doubt employing at this very moment to see if her mysterious visitor spoke truth. 

"You _are_ Callista," Scout said after an eternity. " _How_ \--?" 

Callista lowered her blade, flicked it out existence. "It's a long story. A _very_ long story." She glanced around at the courtyard to linger at the mutilated insect at her feet. A droch, by the looks of it. A very _large_ droch. "I think I'd like to sit down now." 

Scout eyed the remains with distaste. The lightsaber had cauterized the initial wound but dark hemolymph now oozed out of the joints and sockets onto the dusty ground. "Fair enough. Follow me."


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Djinn Altis's remarks about attachment are based on a quote in Karen Travis's _The Clone Wars: No Prisoners_. His comment about where to begin is a quote from _Alice's Adventures in Wonderland_ by Lewis Carroll. 
> 
> Whie Malreaux relates his vision to Scout towards the end of of _Yoda: Dark Rendezvous_ by Sean Stewart. There's also a blink-and-you'll-miss-it cameo of Laranth Terrik from the Coruscant Nights series by Michael Reaves, as the Whiplash agent who smuggles Scout off-planet.

"You look different," Scout said. 

"You, too," Callista said, looking up from her mug.

They sat across the table from each other, perched on stools in the warm and well-lit kitchen. Bundles of prickly plants dangled from the rafters, and an open fire made with blocky bricks of what looked like dried dung burned low and smoky in the white-stoned hearth. Cu'pa manure, Callista guessed, having encountered the massive beasts of burden in the streets on her way from the tavern; wood was too rare and precious on this arid world to use as fuel. 

She took a sip of the brown and bubbling tisane Scout had offered her, and tried to gather her thoughts. With no oceans to hold the heat, nights were bitterly cold here, and she was grateful for the steaming drink of unknown origins. Whatever it was, it tasted far better than the swill at the Blerd. 

Scout had removed her veils, revealing bright green eyes attuned to every detail and a tangled mass of red hair down to her shoulders. She must be well in her fifties by now, but only hint of her physical age was the faint trace of lines around her temples. 

But it was her carriage, her attitude, her _prescence_ that drew Callista's attention, far more than any other attribute. The Scout of thirty-five years ago had been still in that gawky stage of adolescence, fighting for her place and desperate to prove herself. The woman who stood before her was calm and settled in her own skin, radiating a grounded _certainty_ reminiscent of Djinn Altis in his later years.

_Weathered,_ Callista thought, _like rock and stone in the desert. Smoothed, somehow. Wise. When did she become wise?_

It was an odd thought. Technically, Callista was the elder by a good fifteen years; she'd been the elder mentor to the fledgling Padawan, more experienced in the ways of the world. Now, though, their positions had been reversed: now Callista was younger in body if not in spirit, and she'd spent most of the Galactic Civil War drowsing in the static, timeless realm of the _Eye_ 's computer core. There had been plenty of time for Scout to catch up and surpass her. 

From her direct gaze, it was clear Scout was thinking the same thing. "Your face is narrower. And you got taller," she said, eyeing Callista with the same focused intensity that had earned her that nickname. "I didn't think it was possible to grow taller after puberty. Always wished I could." 

Callista blinked. Oh, yes, her height. Cray had been an exceptionally tall woman, towering over most of the other human females at the Yavin academy. Sometimes she still forgot to duck, with inevitably painful results. 

"But your eyes are right, and you still have your lightsaber, and you know things that only Callista would know about me. And you seem to be here in the flesh, so you're not a ghost, and solid enough, so you're not a vision. If I didn't know better, I'd accuse you of eating drochs--" 

Callista made a face. "I can't imagine why anyone would want to. They don't... look appetizing." 

She wouldn't have thought Scout tense, but the other woman visibly relaxed. Odd. "Yeah, well, you'd be surprised. I'm glad I found you when I did, it would have been a real mess if you'd tried to use the Force on them." 

Callista drew in a breath and tried to speak, but couldn't. There were no words. Of course, Scout wouldn't know. Of course, she would assume that Callista was still--the _same_ \--

"I'm sure you felt it when you were coming in, how strong the Force is here... and how strange," Scout continued. If she noticed Callista's stricken expression, she didn't comment. "You can't use the Force here on Nam Chorios, at least not in the usual ways. Any active use--even lifting a handful of dust--triggers a corresponding storm somewhere on the surface of the world."

So the Force storms the prospectors had told her about weren't merely metaphors. They were literal disturbances marking the activity of Force-users on this world. And she couldn't feel _any_ of it. 

"I heard about that," Callista said, recounting what Umolly Darm had told her at the Blerd. 

"Yes, exactly. My first storm was--very instructive. Several families over in Ruby Gulch died when their house collapsed. After that, I learned the importance of being... careful. Fortunately, more passive activities, like sensing and healing, don't seem to have that effect." Scout smiled, and Callista was reminded of the dim Nam Chorios sunlight reflecting through a crystal formation in the desert. "It's just as well, lifting rocks never my strong point, anyway." 

"So you were the reason for the storms thirty years ago?" 

Scout paused. "Partially," she said at last. "It's... complicated. But first, tell me what brought you here. You may have noticed that Nam Chorios isn't exactly a tourist hotbed, and you didn't come here by chance." 

There was something in her tone that Callista couldn't place--a wariness or suspicion that lay under her open friendliness. Either Scout wasn't quite convinced she could trust this long-lost friend with her secrets now, or she was questioning her unexpected visitor's motives. 

Well, fair enough. No doubt Callista would feel the same way if their positions were reversed. 

"Oh, and while you're at it, I'd love some news from the greater galaxy. I hear bits and pieces from the Newtimers and their smuggler contacts, but there have been a great many... rumors... these last few years, not all of them pleasant." She fixed Callista with a piercing stare. "I suspect you know more about those matters than I do." 

"Well, I--" Callista started. "Wait. You _heard_ that the Jedi had returned and you didn't investigate?" 

Scout shrugged. "You'd be surprised how this place grows on you. My life has been here for thirty-five years. To uproot it all for the sake of rumors I wasn't sure I could trust... did not seem promising." 

Callista frowned at that, but let it go. Maybe that decision would make sense when Scout explained more about how the Force worked on Nam Chorios. Not to mention what had drawn her here in the first place--

She took a deep breath. Well. She would tell her story, then, and see if that would convince Scout to trust her. Odd that no matter how many times she'd thought about this meeting, she'd given no thought to this. Her life was too strange and painful to be easily summarized, and there'd been no cause to explain anything to anyone until now. 

What had Djinn Altis always said when she struggled to express what was far too momentous for spoken language? _Begin at the beginning, and go on until you come to the end. Then stop._

Very well, then. She would start at the beginning, then, and tell the tale fully. Scout would accept no less. 

She let out the breath slowly, calm again. "Did Master Altis ever walk you through the techniques of techniques of projecting the mind into something else, something that would be receptive, to hold the intelligence as well as the consciousness?" 

"Yes," Scout said slowly, realization dawning on her face. "You did _that_?" 

"It seemed like a good idea at the time...." 

Slowly, over the course of many cups of tea, the story unfolded. Callista began with her memories of her last meeting with Scout on the deck of the _Chu'unthor II_ thirty-five years ago, as she left with Geith to investigate rumors of a massive Imperial battleship on the cusp of an automated rampage of rumored Jedi refugees on Belsavis. She spoke of her shock when those rumors turned out to be true, her grief when Geith abandoned her, only for the _Eye of Palpatine_ 's automated guns to shoot him down before her eyes. Her determination to complete her mission and put an end to the ship once and for all. Her pain as she lay dying in central core, the _Eye_ disabled and silent, but salvageable by anyone who knew the codes. Her decision to stay on, to keep fighting, a spirit lingering for decades in an uneasy slumber in the gunnery computers, to ensure that no one would ever use it again--

Until the day Luke Skywalker and two of his students had stumbled across the _Eye_ floating in deep space, and awakened her. 

Callista thought she saw Scout's eyes flicker in recognition at his name, but the other woman said nothing, only leaned over to toss another block of dung on the fire. 

It was harder for Callista to press on with her story, but she forced herself to continue, her voice choking . She spoke of how she and the three Jedi had banded together to destroy the _Eye_ at last. How Nichos Marr had died in the process, and his lover, a young woman named Cray, had offered up her body in her grief so Callista's spirit could survive. How such an unprecedented exchange had worked--at the cost of her ability to touch the Force. 

And that had made life at Luke's fledgling academy on Yavin IV unbearable for her. 

"Oh," Scout said softly, reaching across the table to take Callista's hand. "Oh, Callista. I'm so sorry." 

Scout knew all about not fitting in. About being the odd one out. About not belonging. About lagging behind, as others surpassed her. About wanting, more than anything else, to be a Jedi. 

"Thank you," Callista whispered, her eyes blurring with tears. She squeezed Scout's hand, grateful for the contact, and the genuine compassion. There was no pity, no patronizing here, as she had often sensed or suspected at the Academy. She took a deep breath, and regathered herself. "It was hard. So very, very hard. So I left." 

She skirted over her complex relationship with Luke and the details of her departure. Instead, she focused on her travels, her mad hope of finding any survivors from the past, and the trail that had led her all the way to Nam Chorios. She mentioned offhand that she'd enlisted a slicer to help her track data patterns, but did not elaborate beyond that. 

"I see," Scout said at last when Callista fell silent at last. Her hand still lay on top of Callista's and she made no move to withdraw it. "And what do you intend to do now that you've found me?" 

"I-- wanted to talk. See how you were. What happened. It's lonely being the only one left who remembers." 

"Yes," Scout said slowly. "Yes, it is." 

They sat together in silence, contemplating that. 

"Luke Skywalker," Scout said at last, drawing out the name as if it was fascinating and repellent at the same time. "No relation to Anakin Skywalker, I assume?" 

Callista hesitated. Luke had told the truth of his heritage, of course, and it was no secret among his students, if not the wider galaxy. Yet to speak of it now felt wrong, as if she were spilling a secret that didn't belong to her. And there was that unspoken tension in Scout's arm, coiled like a nexu ready to spring, that made her wary. 

"He's Anakin's son," she said at last, deciding it was better to be blunt and honest than to dance around with half-truths. 

" _No_." Scout jerked her fingers away from Callista, and rose from the table, balling her hands into fists. 

For one terrible instant, Callista had the impression a hive of swirling insects, unleashed for the kill, aiming straight for her face--before Scout relaxed her hands and the sensation vanished. Instead, she began to pace across the kitchen floor, her floor-length jacket swirling around her in a sea of red. 

"That's impossible. How could _Anakin_ have a son? He--" Scout stopped short, and slapped her thighs, hooting with hysterical laughter as she doubled over. "That Senator! That one he was always guarding on Coruscant! Oh! Of course! How did I not see that before! Perfect Anakin, _powerful_ Anakin, defying the rules to have a fling with--" 

"I don't think Luke knows who his mother is," Callista said quietly. "He never knew her. Obi-wan Kenobi took him to Tatooine to be raised by Anakin's relatives when he was born." 

"Obi-wan Kenobi is _alive_?"

"No, Vader killed him fifteen years ago--" 

"You mean Anakin," Scout finished, with a grim smile. "Just like he came to Jedi Temple on that awful night, at the head of a legion of the Republic's finest troops, and slaughtered everyone I knew." She began to pace again, crackling with that same restless energy. "You know that." 

It was true. Every one of Djinn Altis's students had felt that cascade of dark energy rolling through the Force as the Jedi were slaughtered, even if they couldn't pinpoint the source. But Callista had known. She had always known, since that one terrible day when thousands of Jedi died and their cries slammed through the Force. She'd even felt Anakin Skywalker _burn_ , and she had known and welcomed it, for it meant that the Jedi who had turned to darkness and betrayed them all was no more. 

And Scout had been there that night, at the start of it all. That was the story that had lain dormant inside her for so many years, the one Callista had sensed in their sparring thirty-five years ago, but Scout had never confided in her. Now whatever walls she'd built up in her heart had shaken loose at last, and it was all spilling out now--

"I woke in the middle of the night to Master Drallig pounding on my door, telling me to come immediately to the Room of Thousand Fountains in the northwest corner of the temple. By the time I arrived, he was surrounded by a host of other apprentices and other orphaned Padawans, all of us armed. 

"I went over to stand by Whie Malreaux, my closest friend, and tried to crack jokes to lighten the mood, but he couldn't smile. _I_ couldn't smile. All of us were filled with the sick sense of danger, and none of us knew why. 

"The Force was never very strong in me--I could never see the future the way Whie could, never see events weeks or months or years before they happened. I only ever got-- _insights_ , a seconds or two before they actually happened. All of the sudden, I knew I had to run. I didn't know where or why, I knew I had to get out of there right away. As if my life depended on it. It was cowardly, and I knew it; it wasn't something a Jedi would do. But I wanted to run. I _had_ to. It took everything I had just to remain in place. I felt Whie put a hand on my shoulder to steady me, and I was angry that he took me for a coward, but grateful to him for reaching out--

"Then Anakin Skywalker came in, and the Force--changed. It was as if a blanket of darkness fell over us, suffocating and heavy and it was hard to move. Thinking, even breathing was hard. It was like the Force storms I saw when I arrived here on Nam Chorios, only worse, because those were wild, random things, and this was intentional and controlled. He was the eye of the storm, feeling nothing, and the rest of us were caught in its effects. 

"I saw Master Drallig ignite his lightsaber and charge forward--only to be stabbed through the chest. He'd barely begun to fall Anakin raised a hand and Master Drallig's Padawan Bene hovered in the air and broke her neck with a sickening crack. Then Whie pushed me, shouting at me to run as Skywalker turned towards us--"

Her voice broke, and she forced herself to keep going. 

"Six months earlier, Whie had a vision he would die at a Jedi's hands, and he was glad of it. He thought it meant he would go over to the Dark Side, and one of us would come to put him down. I told him that was ridiculous, that he was never going to fall, and he should stop worrying about it. But we were both wrong. _He_ didn't fall--Skywalker did.

"I should have run then, right away. But I didn't. I stood there, frozen, and watched Skywalker murder Whie in front of me. Only then--as the troops behind him opened fire on me and the other apprentices--did I run." 

She was weeping now, sobbing into her hands, the words coming thick and fierce. "I don't know how I survived. Dumb luck, I guess, or maybe I didn't seem like a threat, since I was so weak in the Force. Everyone around me fell, but I ran, and Skywalker didn't come after me. I guess he had his mind on other things, or perhaps he was too busy slaughtering the others. I don't know. I still don't know. 

" _He_ didn't follow me, but some of the troopers did. They backed me into a corner and I thought I was going to die there, but one of their shots opened a hole in the big glass windows big enough for me to force my way through. There was glass in my hands, my face, my hair, blood everywhere and I didn't care. All I wanted was to survive. There was no time for anything else. 

"I don't know how I got out of there. I don't remember much of what happened after that. I ran and I ran and I must have fallen over the edge of a balcony or something, because when I woke up I was in the underlevels, and there was a Twi'lek woman bending over me, telling me I was safe and she was going to get me out of there with the other Jedi as soon as possible--" 

"I'm sorry," Callista whispered. "Scout, I'm so sorry."

Scout jerked back, as if the compassion burned. "And now you tell me _he had a son_. A son who is now the _head_ of the Jedi order." Her hands clenched into fists again. "There's _no_ justice. How can I be a part of such a thing when it is so-- _tainted_ now--" 

"Luke didn't know," Callista said quietly. "Kenobi kept him ignorant. He didn't know the truth until Anakin told him when they met for the first time. Then Luke fought his father in front of the Emperor himself, and brought him back to the light."

Scout's mouth dropped open. "That's impossible. You--you can't come back from the Dark Side. It--devours you. Chews you up and spits you out, a demon in your own skin. How--" 

"I don't know for certain. I wasn't there. But Luke said it was love, and I believe him." It sounded impossible until you'd met Luke, and realized it was impossible _not_ to love him. It was as true for her as it had been for Anakin. One glimpse and she'd lost her heart. They weren't the only ones. 

_Focus_. She dragged herself back to the important part, the one detail that changed everything. "It was Anakin Skywalker who killed Palpatine, in the end. No one else could." 

Scout crossed her arms over her chest, unmoved. "Too little, too late. It doesn't make up for everyone he killed--" 

"No, it doesn't. But it _mattered_. His sacrifice ended the war, brought the Republic back, and saved the Jedi. It freed us all." 

"He didn't save _me_ ," Scout retorted. "And now his _son_ thinks he can rebuild the Jedi in his own image--like he even knows what that means--" 

"Stop." Callista's voice was ice. "If you're angry with Luke, go to Yavin and tell him yourself. I have no part in this." 

For a long moment, they stared at each other, the tension stretched like a taut wire that neither dared to break. Then Scout took a deep breath and mastered herself. "You're right. It's not your fault, I'm sorry, I--" 

"I know," Callista said gently. "I'm sorry, too. Terrible things happened that cannot be undone. And you shouldn't have been here alone." 

"Who else was left?" Scout began pacing across the room again. "My first master was slaughtered in the opening salvos of the Clone Wars; my second master died in a pitched battle against Asajj Ventress six months later; everyone else died in the Jedi Temple not long after that. Then, just as I'd started to get my life back together with Master Altis, you left, Geith left, Margani died, and--"

"Master Altis--?" Callista stopped short, unable to finish her question. She'd assumed that her teacher had died long ago, and yet the fresh reminder send a wave of agony coursing through her chest. She could only imagine how Scout felt, having lived through it. 

Scout nodded, her eyes mournful. She strode over to the kettle suspended on a rack over the fire, refilled her mug and downed it all in one long swig. 

"What _is_ that, anyway? It's good," Callista asked, gesturing to the kettle as she took the opportunity to help herself to another serving. 

"Rokja leaves," Scout said when she came up for air. "From the courtyard outside. Caf won't grow here, so I make do." 

"I didn't know you had an aptitude for that." 

Scout laughed. "It's funny, I always avoided the plants and trees at the Temple. I was afraid if I showed the slightest interest, they'd use it as an excuse to pack me off to the AgriCorps. But here I am, long after the AgriCorps is space dust, adding a little touch of green to the desert." 

"It's beautiful. Your garden, I mean." 

"It's not really _my_ garden. It belonged to the Old Lady. I just take care of it now that she's gone." 

"Who is the Old Lady? That's the second time I've heard the name today. And they call you a Healer now--" 

"My turn," Scout sighed. "This is going to take a while." 

Callista gestured to her mug. "I've waited thirty years for this. What's another hour to that? And your life _cannot_ be stranger than mine." 

"I wouldn't go _that_ far." 

"So, surprise me." 

***

"After you and Geith left, life was quiet for a few months, more or less. I couldn't decide which was worse: the silence, or the rumors. Terrible things were happening - whole populations rounded up and enslaved or slaughtered where they stood, wholesale destruction, the first stirrings of rebellion. Every new revelation made it harder and harder to hope. But when we didn't hear anything, I could pretend nothing was happening, even though I knew better, and that only made each fresh snippet harder to bear. 

"Of course, everyone on the _Chu'unthor II_ wanted to help. They were Jedi. Why wouldn't they, despite all the dangers? They set off in twos and threes on missions of their own, in response to encryped courier messages from Alderaan and other hotbeds of sedition, and I don't know what happened to them. Mostly, we never heard from them again. Chatha and Drill did come back, but they left again almost immediately, and died not longer afterwards in an Inquistor's ambush. 

"I cried for days when I got the news, not because I knew them well, but because it took me back to the Temple again, and it seemed like everyone was dying except for me. I couldn't figure out what was so special about me that _I_ was still alive and they were not. 

"It's funny, because the Masters at the Temple kept telling me I had to leave the Order for my own good. They weren't unkind about it at all, which made the whole thing even worse. I wasn't good enough, wasn't talented enough, wasn't strong enough, wasn't _enough_ for their standards, and they wanted to keep me out of the war because they assumed I'd be dead in a week if they didn't. They were trying to do what they thought was best to protect me... for my own good. But in the end, I lived, and they didn't. How's that for irony? 

"We hoped you and Geith were alive, but we didn't know what had happened out there, except that Master Plett and the Jedi families on Belsavis had made it off-planet safely, and the planet was still habitable. So we hoped you two were out there somewhere, hunkering down and waiting to return in safety, but we didn't _know_ anything for certain. I asked Master Altis about the future once, and he gave me the saddest smile I ever saw and said, 'Clouded' in such a mournful voice I never dared to ask again. It must have been so hard for him--it was hard for all of us--but I can only imagine how difficult it was for him to watch so much of his life's work go up in blood and flames. 

"We didn't leave the Bespin atmosphere much--it didn't seem safe--but he'd set the _Chu'unthor II_ up as a safe refuge, and kept in contact with all his various connections. One by one, they all faded out. Either they went into hiding places so deep he couldn't reach them or they died. Finally, it was just me, Master Altis, and Margani, all alone on that big ship. 

"And then Margani died. It was her time, I think; she wasn't sick or anything that I noticed. But her death broke Master Altis in a way that nothing else had. 

"You have to understand. He didn't give up. He never, _ever_ gave up. But it--changed him. He wasn't the same after that. To be fair, I wasn't either. She was... kind to me, in a warm friendly way I'd never experienced before. I never really knew my mother--I was too young when I was handed off to the Jedi to remember much--and I never really wanted one, but when she died, it felt like I'd lost a mother I didn't know I had. And Master Altis and I both grieved... 

"I asked him once what the point was, of marriage and love and attachment. What about it that was so important he'd walked away from the Order to defy their precepts and follow his heart. ' _We need more attachment, not less,'_ he told me. _Attachment isn't the enemy unless we're unable to relinquish it when it's time to part. Attachment can stop us from tearing ourselves apart. If anything can save this galaxy from itself, it's love that will save this galaxy_ '. I never forgot that. 

"We gave Margani a sky burial in the traditional Bespin way. She loved the rawwks... now she _is_ the rawwks, or they're her, I don't know. She's one with the Force now, in any case, so maybe both answers are right, depending on how you look at it. 

"After that, it was just me and Master Altis, rattling around on that big ship, hanging on as best we could. On the third day after the sky burial, he decided it was time for action. Time to move. Bespin had been his home for longer than I'd been alive, but he woke up that day and knew he was ready to go and that was that. So we did. 

"I was ready. More than ready, really. I had just turned fifteen, and I was ready for some action. _Any_ action. ...I didn't know what I was myself into, of course. I'd outlived two Jedi Masters at that point, no way in hell was I going to let him be the third. But he never asked me to stay behind, never treated me like I was useless baggage or a liability, and I was grateful. 

"The first thing he did was erase the presence of the _Chu'unthor II_ from every possible computer anywhere it had ever been over the course of the ship's lifetime. I don't know how he did that. Then he piloted the ship out into deep space on the edge of the Vorzyd sector, and we took the last two-seater Y-wing to Nam Chorios.

"When I asked him what we were doing, he told me that Bail Organa had asked him to investigate Seti Asgad's disappearance. Organa hoped that Asgad, as Palpatine's chief political rival prior to his exile, would lend his considerable talents against the Empire. Master Altis was skeptical, but felt we had little left to lose by the appeal.

"Of course, the Listeners shot us down almost immediately. We were able to land safely out in the desert, but it was a near thing, and we ended up on the far side of the planet from Asgad's abode in Hweg Shul in a steaming pile of scrap. There was a band of heavily armed Listeners waiting for us when we emerged, blasters pointed at us, and for a moment, I didn't think we were going to make it out alive. 

"But Master Altis didn't even blink. He laughed, and shook his head, and gestured to them that we meant no harm and... after the longest few minutes of my life, they lowered their weapons and agreed. They took us with them after scavenging our ship for spare parts, and we rode out in the crystal-lands for several weeks en route to Hweg Shul. The dreams I had..." 

"So there _is_ something out there after all?" Callista interjected, unable to stop herself. "The Listeners aren't crazy?" 

Scout shook her head. "They're as sane as you or I, if that's any comfort. The _tsils_ speak to them in their minds, using forms they can understand. It's crude, but effective." 

"The crystals--!" 

"Yes. I can confirm that for myself. It's... disorienting at first, but you get used to it after a while." 

Life on Nam Chorios was stranger than she had ever imagined. What had the prospector at the bar said about the Theran Listeners? _'*We* don't like it,' they always say, as if they speak for everyone._ And apparently, they did... or at least a greater percentage of the world than he knew. 

"Anyway, we rode with the Listeners for weeks until they were convinced we would not betray the planet's secrets to the Newcomers," Scout said, pressing on with her story. "There were ugly rumors about Asgad circulating in the Oldtimer villages, vague whispers of darkness and dread, and the _tsils_ didn't like him. With their blessing, Master Altis and I arrived in Hweg Shul to seek out the truth.

"Asgad had wasted no time setting himself up as the de facto leader of the Newcomers, and through them, the self-styled ruler of Nam Chorios. Any greater ambitions had been frustrated by the Listeners and the rise of the Empire, both of which had trapped him into something of a stalemate. Our arrival delighted him, as he thought to use us and our connections with Bail Organa to escape off-planet at last. 

"Asgad's deputy, the so-called Beldarion the Splendid, also saw our arrival as an opportunity. His dream was to depose Asgad and regain the petty dictatorship he'd had in Hweg Shul before Asgad had cozened him out of it." She wrinkled her nose in distaste. "I disliked Asgad on sight, but I _hated_ Beldarion. He'd been a Jedi once, centuries ago, before he'd come to Nam Chorios and become corrupted, chosing power over truth, and his own greed and desire over justice. And he smelled. The whole city _reeked_ of Hutt where he passed." 

"There _were_ two Jedi that came to Nam Chorios centuries ago and one of them _was_ a Hutt after all--" Callista cried out in surprise.

"Precisely. Hutts can live for centuries and Beldarion was young and strong when he came here, burgeoned by his own insatiable appetites. It was his desires that got him into trouble, of course. When his companion objected, he defeated her and had her banished to the outskirts of the city to eke out a living as best she could. He fell in with the Dark Side to reach his ambition: to be lord and master of his own private world, unmolested by outside interference. And it worked, for a time... 

"Hutts like to eat insects, and the local insect species on Nam Chorios were quickly driven extinct by his gluttony. So he turned to drochs. He liked his food live and wriggling, and he liked variety. He liked challenge. So he raised up a droch as a prize meal, fattening it up by feeding it first on its fellows, and then on the lives of criminals and prisoners. And in the process... he was corrupted. 

"Drochs are life-drinkers. I don't know if they were always that way, or if the Grissmaths on Meridian genetically altered them to _make_ them so, but-- they're parasites. Fortunately, sunlight refracted through the _tsils_ weakens them, rendering their bites a nuisance instead of fatal. But the ones in the shadows can get very big--like you saw outside, and the the larger they are, the smarter they get--" 

"Beldarion raised up one droch for decades, preparing for the best feast of his life, until that droch became sentient and turned the tables. It drank Beldarion's life and enslaved him, using his host to gain more and more victims. That was how Asgad was able to defeat Beldarion without the Force; the Hutt was so weak and subject to the droch's will at that point, he could barely touch the Force. Once Beldarion was no longer useful, the droch abandoned him and went to Asgad instead... offering him long life and power in exchange for sustenance. Beldarion wanted revenge, of course.

"Our arrival triggered a power struggle between Asgad and Beldarion and their followers. Beldarion called up the Force to pummel Asgad's forces and uplift his own, triggering a Force storm that echoed in all directions for days after the fighting was over in Hweg Shul. Meanwhile, Master Altis and I did our best to stay out of the way and protect those bystanders that we could. 

"When the dust settled, Asgad was dead, and Beldarion turned to us. Suffice to say, he wasn't interested in compromise. Night had fallen and the drochs were coming out in droves, under the control of Beldarion's droch, who was the size of a human being at that point.

"There was a very ugly battle. Master Altis killed Beldarion, and I used the Force to amplify a cluster of _tsils_ that had been ripped from their rock outcrops and imprisoned in a warehouse and kill the giant droch, and that was the end of that." 

"That's incredible," Callista whispered. "Scout, you're _amazing_ \--" 

A flush of pleasure spread across Scout's face. "Thank you. I never thought I'd ever have a chance to tell anyone about it. It sounds heroic, but it was all a horrible mess at the time." 

"Battles tend to be," Callista agreed. "So what happened after that?" 

"There was no way off-planet, or contact with the outside world, so we were stuck here. But it wasn't so bad, really. The Empire left this planet alone, and life was quiet and calm. Master Altis and I moved into the Old Lady's House, and I rode out from time to time with the Theran Listeners and learned what their Healers and Speakers had to teach me. We did what we could to help the people here, in keeping with our vows. It wasn't a bad life, by any means. 

"Who's this Old Lady?" Callista asked. "I keep hearing her name--" 

"Oh, yes. Taselda. She was the Jedi who came here with Beldarion centuries ago, and he placed her here under house arrest here when he seized power. After that, she went insane and took to eating drochs. By the time we found her--" 

"Wait, wait, _wait_. Human beings don't _live_ that long. How could she--" 

Scout gave her an impatient look. "Drochs are life-drinkers, remember? Whoever eats them gains that energy, that youth, and vitality they absorbed--as well as any memories or fragments of personality they might have picked up. Hutts are strong-willed, but not even a narcissist like Beldarion could stop a decline into madness after a steady diet of drochs. I don't think it took that long for Taselda to succumb. 

"The drochs kept her alive, but at great cost. I think it amused Beldarion to see her like that--ragged and mumbling, living in her own filth, dreaming of lost greatness that had never happened. She was in terrible shape when we found her--technically alive, but completely mad--

"Well, we did what we could. By which I mean, Master Altis did what he could, and I did what he asked me to. The healer of the Theran Listeners came, too, at our request. After she stopped eating drochs, her mind began to return, but her health declined quickly without their life-force to sustain her. We lived here, the three of us, for another five years before her heart gave out and she died.

"Master Altis died peacefully in his bed, about ten years ago. His last words to me were 'Hope. She returns' and then he looked over my shoulder and called out 'Margani, I'm coming' and then he died. Since then, it's just been me here in the house, tending the gardens and doing what I can to help those in need. It's not the life I envisioned for myself growing up, but... it is what it is and I made my peace with it. So many people I know never got a chance to live, to grow up, to decide what they wanted to do--and here I am, still going strong." She paused. "It's my job to remember them.

"Things were quiet for a long time, but the fall of the Empire stirred up a droch's nest here, no mistake about it. It meant more Newcomers, for one thing, who wanted to join to the New Republic and open the planet up to trade. But the _tsils_ are afraid of the miners, and don't want them here, and they've made their opinions clear through the Listeners, and the Oldtimers have gone along with it." 

Callista shook her head in wonder. "So that's why the Listeners shoot at visitors? To keep the _tsils_ safe?"

"Partially. The _tsils_ are also the only thing keeping the drochs in check. The sun of other worlds won't kill the drochs and if they're able to escape to other worlds, there will be no end to the suffering such a plague would unleash--" 

"But the Listeners can't get everyone," Callista said in alarm. "All those smugglers from Pedducis Chorios--" 

Scout held up a hand. "A few fighters now and then are are fine. Any drochs that sneak aboard are killed pretty quickly by the low-level radiation back in orbit. But anything bigger has better shielding that would shield the drochs as well. So the Listeners make sure that nothing bigger than a B-wing ever gets through." 

"So why are you still here? There are ships coming into Hweg Shul every few weeks now. You could leave--" 

"I could," Scout acknowledged. "But I'm one of the few people that Newcomers and Oldtimers both trust. And to be honest, I didn't see a compelling reason to go back out into the galaxy, especially with the Skywalker name still bandied around. It was easy to dismiss rumors as rumors and keep on with the daily routine, with what I knew. But now that you're here--knowing what I know--I'm not so sure--" 

She fell silent and drained her mug. The fire had died to a handful of embers, faintly flickering in the hearth to keep away the drochs. For a long time, they sat together in silence. 

"I think you've done very well," Callista said quietly. Slowly, as if the slightest movement would scare her, she stood up, walking around the table as she reached out to embrace her. 

For a moment, she thought Scout would push her away, reject her offering of comfort. Then, with a strangled sob, the other woman flung herself into Callista's arms, burying her face in her shoulder. Even as Scout's tears soaked her jacket, Callista discovered she was crying, too. 

_Which of us is the older, and which of us is the younger now? Which one of us has paid the heavier price for our lives, for surviving when everything around us was lost?_

She cried for Scout, and for herself. For Djinn Altis, and Margani, and all of the lost Jedi. For the lives that had been twisted and distorted by the Empire. And for Luke, who she had loved and stepped away from when the distance between them grew too painful to bear. 

"Sorry," said Scout at last when the sobs subsided, wiping her nose on the nearest of her veils. 

"Don't be," Callista said with a shaky laugh, pointing to her own face. "I gave as good as I got." 

"You must think I'm so--" 

"I think you were very brave," Callista said. "I admire your courage, for keeping on, even after all of us left you. You don't have to be alone, not anymore. Not unless you want to." 

Silence. Then Scout said, in a small voice, "What will you do now?" 

She gave shaky laugh. "Now, I want to sleep. It's been a long day--and an even longer night. Too much excitement, too many revelations.... I need some time to process it all. But tomorrow... will you take me out to see the crystals?" 

Scout nodded. "Of course."


	7. Chapter 7

Twenty klicks out from Hweg Shul loomed the Ten Cousins, formed millennia ago when a geologic anomaly had thrust the eponymous _tsils_ into a vast ring rather than the usual lines. Revered as a holy site by the Oldtimers, it had been Djinn Altis's favorite place on Nam Chorios, and he'd been buried there with full honors. Callista's throat caught in her breath when Scout had suggested they visit, but she only nodded. 

Instead of taking Scout's failing speeder, the two women rode on a pair of lizard-like cu'pas, whose violent pink and blue skins clashed with the grim drabness of the surrounding landscape. The warm-blooded reptiles barely had the brains to bob their heads and meander at the same time, which made for a surprisingly smooth ride, even if their pace wasn't much faster than a human on foot. 

But that was all right; there was no point in rushing. The cu'pas' slow, steady gait made the changes in the landscape easier to see, as the terraformed greenery along the water seam's edges faded out to hardy weeds and botanical stowaways that eked out a precarious existence in the marginal lands on the settlement's edges. A handful of blerds flew by overhead, and the silence was broken here and there by the soft whine of mikkets, and the wheezes of the cu'pas as they shuffled along the dusty road. 

Then even those tangles of greenery faded, and there was nothing but rock and crystal and the wind that beat fiercely at the heavy jacket Callista had borrowed from Scout. She was grateful for the heavy shrouds wrapping her face, shielding her from the brunt of the impact. 

As they crested the the ridge at Bleak Point, they were greeted by the watchful silhouettes of a dozen shrouded cultists perched on the ramparts of the gun station. It was hard to make out any details under the the shapeless wraps and hoods, but even from a distance, their weapons were unmistakeable: repeating slugthrowers, automatic crossbows, and even spears. 

Callista tensed, her hand surreptitiously reaching for her lightsaber, in case the Listeners started shooting. But a nonchalant Scout only raised a gloved hand and waved. To Callista's surprise, the Listeners bowed as one and let them pass unmolested. 

"Did you tell them we were coming?" she asked as they descended into the crystalline valley, adjusting her veils against the persistent whistle of the desert wind. 

Scout shook her head. "They already knew. They hear voices in their mind when they sleep out in canyons, or drink certain herbs, whispers and warnings of what is happening and what will be. There's very little here they don't know about in one form or another. They say it's the ghosts of their ancestors who speak to them, but the _tsils_ can only use the images from their minds, so much is lost in translation. To be honest, I think the _tsils_ prefer it this way."

"You said last night you'd talked to them... What's it like?"

Scout paused for a long time before replying. "Sometimes they reach out to me. The Force is strong here on this planet, but I barely notice now, like floating in a warm bath the same temperature as my skin--or would be if there was enough water here to spare for a real bath. Every now and then, there's a flash or a flicker in my head, a stream of images when the light hits the crystal at just the right angle. Or if I touch one, I see colors in my mind, rainbow shades that ebb and flow with what passes for sunlight here, feel the vibrations rising from the bedrock into my bones...." 

Her voice trailed off, dreamy and wistful at the memory, before she caught herself. 

"I'm sorry," she said in an embarrassed rush, shaking her head in disgust and avoiding Callista's eyes. "I, of all people, should know what it's like when someone shows off something you wish you could do, but can't--" 

"It's all right," Callista said. To her surprise, she realized she meant it. Ever since that night at the Mulakko Quarry, the deep abiding sense of loss had dulled from constant ache to numbness. She felt no jealousy, now, only an intense but oddly dispassionate curiosity. "Go on." 

Scout dipped her head, relieved. "I hear them best when I'm asleep, which makes actual conversation difficult," she admitted. "But it's always like dreaming to talk to them, even when I'm awake. 

"They're not like us, you know. They don't _think_ the way we do--no blood, no brains, nothing organic at all. They don't have an individual sense of self, and they've been alive and conscious for milennia, with memories stretching back to the formation of the planet itself. They remember when there was a sea in this valley, and how it rose and fell for century after century before it finally faded away for good. They remember the first prisoners staggering off the ships, and they ignored the little creatures bumbling on the surface--until the Newcomers came, with their mines and machines. They didn't like _that_ at all. So they told the Listeners not to join the New Republic, to keep the planet closed to trade." 

"Between the _tsils_ and the drochs, that seems like a good idea," Callista agreed. 

"It doesn't have to be this way. When the Grissmaths first started dumping people here, there weren't any drochs at all. The Grissmaths created them in an attempt to kill off the prisoners--only it backfired because the _tsils_ were able to keep them in check. To keep this planet isolated, they reached out a woman named Theras, and told her to keep any ship larger than a B-wing from leaving the surface. She believed the ancestors had spoken to her, and it was her holy duty to gather a force and seize control of the guns... 

"But there's no _reason_ there couldn't be large cargoes of food and medicine and tech dropped in from orbit--some sort of station set up in low orbit to ferry visitors down to the surface in shuttles. There's plenty of non-sentient minerals that are valuable enough to support small-scale trading without encroaching on the _tsils'_ territory. Something could be worked out. But the Newcomers can't hear the _tsils_ , and won't even _try_ to listen. And it's hard to explain about the drochs without also mentioning the _tsils_...

"So far, it hasn't come to violence yet. The Newcomers bristle and grumble among themselves, and the smuggler trade has picked up considerably in the last few years, but the New Republic accepted the results of the referendum and there isn't much the Newcomers can do about it for now, short of luring more people here to Nam Chorios and demanding another vote. As you may have noticed, Nam Chorios is not a particularly desirable place to live, so short of force and coercion, there haven't been many takers. So it's a stalemate for now." 

They stopped for lunch in a grotto lined with violet crystals, tucked away in the side of the ridge. "Out of the wind," Scout explained, her glowlamp sending purple-tinted rainbows dancing in every direction, "and the crystals keep the drochs away. 

Callista nodded, but said nothing, grateful for the reprieve from both dangers. She gnawed at the dried pemmican Scout offered her, washing it down with several sips of stale and tepid water from a canteen strapped to Scout's mount, before they resumed their journey. 

Now they passed through the ruins of that ancient sea floor, the ground littered with thousands of quartzite crystals that reflected and amplified the sunlight into headache-inducing brilliance. It was just as well that the sun was so faint, or else she'd go blind wandering the wastes, even with the protective goggles she wore. 

Above them on the ridges, lines of crystal-rock chimneys stretched out into the endless distance. "Are those the _tsils_...?" she asked, waving at them. 

"Yes." Scout's lizard lolled its tongue and a trail of drool ran down its pebbly cheek. "Not much further now." 

The valley narrowed into a deep canyon pass as they plunged into what had once been a riverbed draining into that ancient sea. The twists and turns of that primordial waterway led them to another plain, this one marked by a wide circle of _tsils_ that could only be the Ten Cousins. 

For hours now, Callista had felt nothing in the Force. She'd strained her senses for any glimmers of light and sound, images in her mind out of context with her surroundings, but nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The Force might be all around her, but there was no trace of it, only the cruel, cutting wind. 

_But maybe if I got up close--if I could touch the _tsils_ \--something might happen?_

There was only one way to find out. 

They rode in silence up to the towering mounds. As they drew closer, the blocky mounds were revealed as dense clusters of smaller crystals packed tightly together, rather than a single crystal rising for several hundred meters over their heads. In the center of the ring was a mound of shining stones that Scout told her marked the final resting place of Djinn Altis. 

"He wanted a sky burial like Margani, but it doesn't work as well here as it does on Bespin," Scout said quietly as they approached. "No blerds ever get out this far and they don't eat flesh, anyway - but we laid him out here under the open sky for a time while we built a cairn to go over him." 

"You said this was a holy place. Were the _tsils_ \--" 

"Oh, the _tsils_ loved Master Altis. He was so much better at speaking with them than I am. When he died, every Listener within a hundred kilometer radius attended his memorial service. They consider him one of the ancestors, for all that he wasn't born and raised here on Nam Chorios. I--" Her voice broke, and she turned away for a moment to collect herself. "When the _tsils_ talk to me, they use his form, his voice," she said at length. 

"Isn't that...manipulative?"

"Perhaps. But they can't help it, and they know I miss him. It's nice to see him, even when it's not really him, you know?" 

She had no answer to that. She would give anything to be able to speak with him again, but he had gone beyond, and she couldn't even dream of reaching him without the Force. "It's beautiful here," she said instead, careful to hobble her cu'pa before walking to the foot of the cairn. 

"Yes, it is," Scout agreed. 

Callista reached out and brushed her fingertips lightly over the cool, smooth facet of the nearest crystal. _Hello,_ she thought, her reflection in the pale smoky rock reminding her of that moment in the ice at the Mulakko restort. Nothing. 

She turned away and walked over to her teacher's grave, numb and empty. She was beyond all grief now, all disappointment, all hope. She was translucent like her reflection, all form and no substance, dull and strictly material. For an illusion imposed on her by her senses, it was a compelling one. 

Even standing at Djinn Altis's grave, it was hard to accept that he was gone, gone beyond wherever it was that people went when they died. He was united with his beloved Force now, in a way that she remembered distantly, faintly, from her past, but was now lost to her forever.

It was a miracle she'd managed to find Scout here on this forsaken planet. It would have been too much to hope that Master Altis would have survived this long, too. 

"Good-bye, Master Altis," she whispered, knowing he was out there now, everywhere and nowhere at once. "I miss you. I hope you would be proud of me-- I wish I could tell you everything--make you smile--hear your laughter--" 

"Callista!" Scout called, startling her out of reverie. "Ground lightning! You'll want to see this!" 

Callista followed Scout's gaze eastward to the distant cliffs on the horizon. Blue-white lightning roiled along the distant cliffs, arcing from _tsil_ to _tsil_ as it rolled forward, crackling and sparking every time it bounced off the face of one of the crystals. As the lightning descended the slope, it picked up speed and intensity, raging like wildfire across the plain towards them. 

For a moment, Callista's mind choked with panic, but as with the Listeners at the gun station, there was no trace of fear in Scout's posture or voice. She watched in awe as the rolling wave came closer, sucking in her breath as she realized its angle of approach meant it would leave the Ten Cousins unscathed and there was nothing to fear. 

_Damned nuisance they are,_ Umolly Darm had in the tavern in Hweg Shul, _not usually lethal, but they hurt like hell, and they make all the electronics go haywire for a couple hours afterward. The Oldtimers don't trying to raise their houses-- after a storm passes, they just shake themselves off and keep going like nothing happened._

"Can you feel it?" Scout said. "Can you feel the Force? It's so _strong_ now--like a roaring of the ocean, the wind in a duststorm, pouring over everything like _real_ sunlight--" 

For a moment, Callista stared. Then her mind went into overdrive as she realized what she was looking at: the Force itself, literally manifested before her. 

She'd never get a better chance. 

She burst into a run, plunging towards the electric blue wave coursing across the plains. Her breath came raw and ragged in her throat as the wind picked up, so hard she staggered under the brunt, but kept going. The Force, the Force, she had to touch it, had to feel it, had to reach it--she'd searched so hard and long, she couldn't let it pass by her now--so close--so-close

With a buzzing crack, the lightning swept over her. She cried out in pain as the energy hit her, tearing every molecule in her body apart with ragged fire, her bones melting and reforming and melting again. It was too much for her body to handle, and her mind shut down from the shock of it, leaving only raw and twitching nerves that couldn't help but feel. 

She was dying again, on the _Eye of Palpatine_ 's gunnery floor, the blaster bolts everywhere, racking her with auomatated precision, only there hadn't been this much pain before the shock had taken over and everything went black--

And then she was lying on her back with jagged rocks digging into her spine, alive but almost wishing she wasn't. The blue wave of energy had vanished, but Umolly Darn hadn't been kidding when she'd called its effects "a damned nuisance". If anything, she'd understated the experience. It was a cross between electrocution and a hangover, and dying all over again. 

"Well, that was something," Scout said, intruding into Callista's peripheral vision as she knelt by her side. 

"I had to try," Callista whispered, though her jaw ached and her throat burned. Her lips were cracked and dried, and a faint line of blood ran down her face and into her mouth. 

"Yes, I suppose you did... Did it work?" 

"No." Everything hurt, but her mind was clear and calm, still and quiet and empty of all grief and loss. "The Force is here, but not in a form I can use or comprehend. But I had to try," she repeated, wondering why she wasn't more upset about this latest failure. 

Scout laughed, but not unkindly. "Don't worry, I would do the same thing in your shoes." She took a small paper packet out of one of her many coat pockets, unscrewed the lid of the water canteen, and poured a red-brown powder into the liquid. "This will help with the pain if you can drink." 

"Nnnggggghhh." Moving seemed like an awful idea at the moment, as if she would shatter into a thousand pieces at any moment. "What is it?" 

"Dried gomex moss. Most of the Oldtimers carry it in case they get caught in a storm." 

She couldn't help the giggle that slipped through at this latest revelation; it was all too absurd. "The Newcomers think they're complete lunatics for not avoiding them in the first place." 

Scout rolled her eyes. "I told you," she explained patiently, as if to a child, "the Newcomers don't listen worth a damn. They think the customs and traditions here are all superstition and sophistry and they miss out on what's right in front of their noses. And they say the _Oldtimers_ are the primitive ones." 

"Unnhhh," Callista said, the pain providing a welcome distraction from local politics. 

Scout took pity on her and helped her sit upright long enough to drink. The red-tinged brew was unpleasantly stale and bitter, but she drank without complaint, grateful for the coolness in the back of her throat. To her surprise and relief, the effect was almost immediate. Every joint and muscle still ached, but at least she could move without shattering into a thousand pieces. 

It was another hour before she felt well enough to travel, and by then, the sun was low in the sky and the shadows were lengthening. "We'll be safe enough from the drochs as long as we keep moving," Scout said at last, taking Callista's arm and helped her to her feet. "But we do have to get moving." 

A thought occurred to her as Scout eased her over her cu'pa for their return to Hweg Shul. "We should spar when we get back." 

"You're on," Scout said instantly. "I'm out of practice with lightsabers, but I've been teaching some of the Listeners my favorite jointlocks from Master Iron Hands to stay in shape." 

Great. The only thing more intimidating than insane cultists with guns was insane cultists with excellent hand-to-hand combat skills. No wonder the Newcomers hadn't been able to wrest control of the gun stations away from the Listeners.

"You don't have a lightsaber?" She thought she'd seen a bulge in the folds of Scout's coat, but it was too bulky be certain. 

"Actually, I have a whole collection. Djinn gave me Margani's lightsaber after she died. I used it until I built one of my my own a few years after we got shipwrecked here. I don't know what happened to Taselda's original lightsaber; Beldarion hid it somewhere and we never could find it. She was always asking about it, until I gave her Margani's and that calmed her down. I keep it in a chest back at the house, along with Beldarion's and Master Altis's." 

"You made a lightsaber?" 

"Try not to sound so surprised," Scout said peevishly. 

"No, no, I'm not doubting your competence--but there can't possibly be kyber crystals here, they're far too rare for that. You didn't use a _tsil_ , did you--?" 

"Of course not! I asked the _tsils_ for advice, and they directed me to a couple of unusual mineral deposits where I was able to find a stone that would roughly approximate a kyber. I think it worked pretty well. Master Altis was pleased with it, too." 

"Can I see it?" 

In answer, an emerald flash the same color as her eyes emerged out of Scout's hand. Her cu'pa sidled uneasily beside her, unsettled more by the sudden movement than the weapon itself, before the blade vanished and she stowed it away underneath her jacket again. 

"Well done," Callista said, hoping her own lightsaber skills were up to snuff after so many weeks with practicing only with remotes. "We'll have to go a few rounds and see how much you remember..." 

They bantered back and forth as they set off, falling at last into a companionable silence as Callista mulled over her encounter with the ground lightning. 

She hadn't felt the Force at all. Had touched it--had it pass through her-- and felt nothing, as she'd confessed to Scout. And yet, somehow that didn't bother her. 

_"I am complete as I am; nothing is missing,"_ she'd whispered to her reflection in the ice of the Mulako Quarry resort. And it was true. She missed the Force, missed Luke--and probably always would--but the omnipresent ache had dulled a soft quiet sadness that was no longer occupied every waking moment. She would always carry it with her, but--her life was no longer defined by her loss. 

Somehow, in the midst of everything, she'd broken free of the obsession that had driven her ever since her awakening in Cray's body. She would still try to regain her powers, that was a given, but--she would no longer let that drive control her. She would no longer let her losses define her. 

Master Altis, she thought, would approve. 

"What will you do now?" Scout asked after a while, as if she could sense her companion's train of thought. 

"I don't know," she said after a moment. "I spent so much time and energy trying to find the Force--not to mention you--and now-- Now, I need a new direction." 

"You could stay here, you know. Despite the weirdness and hardships, it's not a bad life, and you'd be surprised how much it grows on you--

Callista shook her head. "It's beautiful here, but it's not the place for me. I don't know what I'm supposed to do with my life, but I know it isn't here. I want to touch the Force again, and I can't do that here." 

"Fair enough," Scout said, clearly expecting that rejection, though she couldn't quite hide a flicker of disappointment in her voice. "For what it's worth, I would do the same thing in your place. I would never give up. No matter how impossible, no matter how long or hard I had to work for it, if it could be done--and even if it couldn't--I would still reach for it. No matter what." 

"Thank you." Callista was touched by this encouragement. Everyone at the Yavin academy--even Luke, who had brought a Sith Lord back to the light from sheer determination--had thought her misguided at best, and openly insane at worst. But if there was anyone who knew about triumphing over impossible odds and surviving, it was Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy. 

"What about you? What are you going to do now?" she asked, directing the conversation back to Scout. 

"Oh, I don't know," Scout said casually--too casually. She was planning something. "I had given up rejoining the Jedi. But now that I know for certain that they're back--" A long pause. "I've wanted to be a Jedi all my life."

"You _are_ a Jedi," Callista said gently. "No one deserves that title more than you. Not after all you've been through." 

"Yes, but--is living my life on one small planet in a distant corner of the galaxy, out of touch with everything but the day-to-day minutiae _enough_? Is that really supposed to be it? And now that I know the rumors are true and the Jedi are back--how can I stay away?" 

Callista thought about Luke's stories of his teachers' eighteen years of solitary exile under the Empire, and nodded. "So you're thinking of leaving, then." 

"Well, yes. It's been a good life here, and I've done good work but nobody particularly _needs_ me to do it. There are other healers far more talented with the Force than I, even if they don't know that's what they're doing. The Necomers may grumble and fuss, but the _tsils_ are safe, and keep the drochs in check, and life here will go on without me. And it would be nice to see the galaxy again, go somewhere with a brighter sun and enough water for a decent bath. It'd be nice to see _trees_ again. I miss them." 

"Didn't you grow up on Coruscant?" Callista asked, puzzled. "Not exactly a wilderness reserve." 

"We had trees at the Temple. Whole courtyards full of gardens, including a few that could talk to you through the Force. I used to go and sit with them when I was hurt or angry or frustrated by my failures, until I worried the Council might use it as an excuse to ship me off to the AgriCorps. They never judged me. But Skywalker killed them all when he burned the Temple, just like he did my friends--and everything was lost. I don't think anyone could ever bring them back." 

"But they didn't all die," Callista said. Scout turned to stare at her. "Yoda took Luke to visit one last survivor, and her brought seeds back with him. There are two saplings now at the academy on Yavin. I saw them myself. If you want to see them... you can." 

"I don't know about that," Scout said quickly. She nudged her cu'pa to move faster, twisting with sudden restlessness on the saddle. 

"Just think about it," Callista urged. "There's no shortage of water and hotsprings on Yavin - it's a rainforest, the complete opposite of Nam Chorios. Anyway, we have plenty of sparring to do before you have to make a decision." 

"I hope you've been practicing your joint-locks." 

_Me, too,_ Callista thought, wondering how Scout would respond to Noghri incapacitation techniques she'd picked up from Traitakh's tutelage on Yavin. She suspected she'd be able to win the first bout with the element of surprise on her side--but after that, it was anyone's guess who would win the next round. 

She decided that she liked it that way.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Luke's adventures on Dagobah with Force-sensitive trees are detailed in my fics [Training Montage](), and [Suicide Run](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13929528). Callista's introduction with the trees at the Yavin Academy can be found [here](https://atamascolily.tumblr.com/post/177026886746/a-natural-history-of-tatooine-part-21). Traitakh is an OC of mine with whom Callista [develops a friendship with](https://atamascolily.tumblr.com/post/177414083789/a-natural-history-of-tatooine-part-23) in _A Natural History of Tatooine._


	8. Chapter 8

"Sure you won't come to Yavin with me?"

Scout leaned against the airlock door, flight helmet tucked under her arm, a plaintive note in her voice that belied her otherwise unshakeable confidence. Through the _Saints Ascending_ 's aft viewport, the silver-brown speck of Nam Chorios gleamed, a pale brown ball in a sea of stars.

Callista shook her head. "Not this time. My path leads elsewhere now. But this isn't the end of the road for either of us, not by a long shot."

"But how will I reach you if you're always on the move?"

She dug into her pocket and pulled out a comlink tuned to a secure frequency that Ghent had prepared precisely for this purpose. "Please don't tell Luke you have this," she said as she dropped the device into Scout's proffered palm.

Tallisibeth Enwandung-Esterhazy was nobody's fool. Her eyes flicked back and forth between the comlink in her hand and Callista's face, the gears in her mind working at furious rate. Sure enough, a few seconds later--

"Ohhhhhh," she inhaled sharply as the answer clicked into focus, her eyes wide with dawning realization. "You mean, you and _Luke Skywalker_ were--"

"Mmmm- _hmmm_ ," Callista said, bracing herself for the coming emotional storm of outraged disapproval and betrayal. But laughter surprised her.

"You and _Luke Skywalker_ , hahahaha, that's _incredible--!"_ Scout wheezed, doubled over by the force of her convulsions. "You and--ah, Force, that's so funny, I can't--I can't even _believe_ it--"

"Believe it or not, as you like. Just don't let it slip you know how to reach me."

Faced with Callista's firmness, Scout sobered quickly. "Oh. It's like that, is it?"

"For now," she said, unable to hide the sadness that always accompanied memories of Luke. "I'm not ready. And to be honest, I don't know if he's ready, either. It wasn't an easy parting for us."

Her equilibrium restored, Scout was still trying to process the implications. "How did the two of you--"

"Just wait until you meet him yourself. He's quite charming, in his own earnest way," Callista said, unable to hide her smile. "You might even change your mind about him, despite his ancestry."

Scout ignored the last remark, which was probably just as well.

"I can see how that would complicate life for you," she said at last, straightening herself back up to her full height and shaking out her shoulders. "Are there any messages you want me to deliver to him?"

Now it was Callista's turn to stare slack-jawed in surprise. She'd never even considered the possibility of reaching out to Luke in this way. Not now. Not like this. Not when she still had so far to go.

She wanted to talk to him, she really did. She missed him, missed the closeness they'd had and the times they'd shared, even without the Force to bolster their connection. But opening that door now would put her right back where she'd started when she left Yavin, suffocating with jealousy and grief, continually reminded of her own deficiencies by the kind and well-meaning people who loved her.

She'd left Luke, and hurt him terribly in the process. The last thing he needed was for her to re-open those old wounds, to offer him hope that she might soon return. One day, perhaps, that might be true, but for now--it was a lie.

"Tell Luke I'm doing well," she said at last. "But only if he asks."

Scout nodded. "I will."

A long pause stretched out between them, until finally Scout shifted. "Well, I guess this is it then. For now."

"Yes," Callista agreed. "The galaxy has changed a great deal since you landed on Nam Chorios. You'll be surprised by all that's happened--delighted by some things, appalled by others. I know I was."

"Oh, yeah? But credits are still credits, right?"

Wedged under the passenger seat in the Y-wing waiting outside the airlock was a durasteel box packed with rare minerals would make Scout a wealthy woman the instant she set foot on a trading world like Muunilist or Corellia. There were advantages, it seems, to being friends with sentient rocks.

"You'll be fine," Callista said with a chuckle. "Go out. See it all. Just don't listen to popular music. It's going through an atonal phase right now. Absolutely awful."

As she'd hoped, Scout laughed, and the tension broke. Even as Callista began to turn away, the other woman stepped forward, reaching out for one last embrace. "May the Force be with you," she whispered in Callista's ear. "And thank you. For everything."

"May the Force be with you, too," Callista said softly. She blinked, startled by the tears trickling down her cheeks, overcome by the sudden wave of grief and loneliness. To be alone again after so long was going to be harder than she'd thought.

But there was no doubt in her mind that she'd made the right choice.

They held each other for a long moment, breathing quietly with each other. The helmet dug into Callista's hipbone, but she let Scout pull away first.

"Time to fly," Scout said. "It's been so long since I've done anything more complex than a landspeeder... I hope I make it all right. It would be awful to survive this long only to die flubbing the landing on my first space flight in decades."

"Just use the autopilot until you get the hang of it. And thank you for convincing the Theran Listeners not to shoot us on our way out. After that, it's smooth sailing from here...."

"I hope you're right about that," Scout said, punching the command to open the airlock. With a quiet zip, the doors swung open long enough for her to pass through, helmet in hand, before they closed again behind her.

Callista leaned against the viewport to steady herself and the tears come as they would. She didn't try to brush them away. She watched as Scout maneuvered the two-seater Y-wing out of its dock with the Ascending, and waved as the fighter looped back over the yacht before vanishing from sight, just as Scout and Djinn Altis had waved to her from the Chu'unthor II so many years ago.

She thought she saw Scout waving in reply, before the Y-wing vanished from view.

***

There was a message from Ghent waiting for her in the passenger lounge. She flicked a switch and with a burst of static, the familiar quarter-size holo of the slicer at his console shivered into the display.

"Ah, computer lady! I hope you survived your battle with those crazy cultists and made it back to your ship by now--hopefully with your friend in tow. Otherwise, it could be a very long wait on my end." His face fell, as he considered the implications.

"If you are stuck on-planet, I hope you'll find a way to get a message out, so I can come rescue you--maybe wrapped inside a music box, like in this holo I saw once! Or you know, the usual encrypted comm channel. Whatever works." He cleared his throat, fiddling with the pale blue strands of his ponytail. "But that's not why I commed.

"I hope I hear from you soon. General bel Iblis has forced everyone in the department to take mandatory ethics training for months now. It's so boring--some guy droning for hours and hours about the proper protocols for every little thing. Takes forever to get anything done that way. Karrde never made us do anything like that for his assignments--"

"Glad to know you remember your time with organization with such fondness," an unfamiliar voice smoothly cut in. "You know you're welcome to join us any time."

A hand on Ghent's shoulder was followed seconds later by its owner stepping into the frame, an impeccably dressed businessman in a tailored suit, with a dark beard and even darker eyes. Callista realized that the man wore sunglasses as he flicked them off with his free hand, folding them neatly into the breast pocket of his suit.

"Ah, well--er--I don't think General bel Iblis would like that," said Ghent, more flushed and awkward than ever compared to the urbane sophistication radiating from his companion. "Computer lady, this is my old boss, Talon Karrde. He used to be a smuggler. Now he's--"

"Chief of the Smugglers Alliance, yes," said Karrde smoothly. "An ongoing venture to legitimize traders and trading routes forced underground by the Empire. But that's not why I'm here, Jedi Masana. I'd like your assistance with an experimental venture I've been contemplating for some time now. It seems that you and Ghent have a knack for finding people who don't want to be found--"

_How do you know about that?_ Callista thought, on the verge of sudden panic. _Ghent, you weren't supposed to tell anyone about me, you said you wouldn't--_

"I didn't say anything!" Ghent squeaked, as if he'd read her mind. It was just a recording, of course, but the illusion was particularly convincing. "I just asked him for some contacts to get you a free stay at the Mulako Quarry resort, because that instructor at ethics training said it was wrong to break into their systems even if they didn't secure them very well. I mean, not that I would get caught, but why take the risk--"

"Ghent was very circumspect," Karrde agreed. "But information is my business, and I make a good living on it. Which is why I'm here today. I have a proposition I'd like to present to both of you."

_Huh?_ Whatever she'd expected, that wasn't it. _What kind of proposition would an ex-smuggler have for a Jedi like me--_

"I'm starting a new business brokering information to the New Republic, the Imperial Remnant, the Corporate Sector, and other local governments. I've recently received a tip on the whereabouts of someone I'd thought dead for decades, and I'm hoping that the two of you would be able to locate him for me."

"It's actually kinda cool, Callista," Ghent interjected. "I mean, like our project, Karrde used to know this guy way back in the day, and took over his organization after he vanished--"

"My former mentor, Jorj Car'das," Karrde said with a nod. If he was annoyed by Ghent's intrusion, it didn't show on his face. "Shortly before his disappearance, he amassed a huge volume of datacards, with enough information to rival the galaxy's great libraries. It all vanished with him, and was never found. If you and Ghent could find any traces of Car'das or his information, it would be of incalculable help to me. After all"--a slight wince passed across his face, almost too fast to see--"he may also have sent agents to try to kill me on several occasions. I could use a woman with your...talents and discernment to help me find a better way to resolve whatever lingering conflicts might remain after I took control of his organization following his disappearance."

Callista blinked.

"It'll be so much fun," Ghent said, bubbling over into the manic eagerness she knew so well. "I mean, we found your friend--I hope we found her this time, anyway--how else are we going to top that? I'll do all the calculations and you can go and see if I'm right. I've updated all the algorithms so it may not even take us that long to find him--"

"Thank you, Ghent," Talon Karrde said, pleasant but firm. "Jedi Masana, please consider my proposal with Ghent and let me know what you decide. He can assure you I am very generous with my people, and I neither play games nor risk lives unnecessarily."

He paused for a moment. "Oh, and there's no need to worry that I'll inform a certain Jedi Master of your whereabouts, regardless of what you decide. I look forward to hearing your answer--"

With another spurtz, the comm clicked off. She sat alone in the darkness of the lounge for nearly fifteen minutes, struggling to comprehend what had just happened. Even after she replayed the message twice, she still wasn't any closer to an answer.

It was midnight on Coruscant, but she commed Ghent anyway, too muddle and confused to bother waiting until local dawn. Not being the type for conventional schedules, he answered within seconds.

"Is he always like that?" Callista asked, without any preamble.

Ghent nodded. "'M sorry," he mumbled, staring down at his bare feet. "I didn't meant to let it slip about, I'm sorry, I just wanted to help you, help--"

She waved off his concerns. "Ghent. Ghent. You did fine. It's all right, I promise. What do you think of his offer?"

"Honestly? Like I said, it sounds fun. With all the refinements I've been doing to my search process, I think we can find him even faster than we found your friend--you did find her, right?"

"I did, but--"

"Awesome! I knew it!" He began typing furiously into his console. "What happened? Was she alive? Did she come back with you?"

One day she would tell him the story, but right now wasn't the time. "It's complicated," she managed.

Fortunately, Ghent was already onto the next thought. "But you found her. That's great! So I think this means we can find Car'das within six months, given the re-programmed algorithm and some super-helpful quantum packets I just picked up-- we are doing this, right?

"I--I don't know," she stammered. "Everything's happened so _fast_."

Yet she had to admit she was intrigued. A job with Ghent's old boss, an urbane smuggler with a checkered past, now re-making himself in this new era. And he'd asked her specifically to do it. He knew she was a Jedi--he had to know she couldn't use the Force. And yet he'd asked for her anyway--

And she needed a new direction in her life, now that Scout was gone. As wild and crazy as this assignment was, it might be exactly what she needed.

And if Karrde was as half as good as he'd claimed, he'd pay her handsomely for the fieldwork and the travel she would probably do anyway.

She shook her head at the absurdity of it all. A future she'd never anticipated spun out before her: dead ends and false starts, following leads and asking questions wherever they took her, until they either found their quarry or Karrde pulled them off the trail, whichever happened first.

Who knew where this path would take her? But right now, there was a whole galaxy to explore on her terms, free from the constraints of her past and the Jedi Order. Maybe someday, she would feel Force again, and return full circle back to her starting point. But not today.

_The universe has a sense of humor_ , Djinn Altis had always told her. Right now, she didn't doubt it.

"Send me what you have so far on Car'das," Callista said. "This sounds like the beginning of another excellent adventure."

She was rewarded by a smile brighter than an arc-welder. "Computer lady, I am _so_ on it."


End file.
